Splinter Cell Conviction

I just finished playing the new Splinter Cell. It took about 5 hours to complete. Without dumb trial and error and sudden death parts I guess it would have taken about 3 hours to play through. This is definitely one of the shortest games this generation of consoles has to offer. Yeah yeah sure there is the coop campaign and multiplayer but still. The shortness doesn't even bother me all that much since I think most games are way too long and they get just repetitive. I'd much rather have short and interesting game that would keep me interested enough to play it again.

I'm not going to compare this to the previous Splinter Cells in any way. I realize this is a new direction the developers are trying and that's the way I'm going to treat it. I pretty much have no idea what the hell happened in the game plot-wise other than that Fisher's pissed of about his daughters death who isn't actually dead and then some evil dudes try to do something bad in Washington. That's about how much I cared about the plot. On a side note the hobo-ish Sam Fisher is awesome. He actually feels angry as hell and that kind of makes it okay to be able to take down a platoon of trained soldiers by himself.

About half of the levels are really cool and the new game mechanics in Conviction really shine. The "mark and execute" feature is nice and adds a bit of tactics into confrontations. The projected mission info and objectives being shown on the surfaces of the game world is very stylish. It's also cool when you go hiding and the color bleeds out from the screen and this is actually a pretty informative and intuitive way to show that you're concealed. The other half of levels is filled with awkward moments which the engine clearly wasn't made to handle. Iraq flashback level is totally stupid. I mean you have none of the tricks that you have just learned to use in your disposal. It's just a shooter level and a bad one with third person controls. Then you have the level where you have to avoid being seen or the level fails instantly. Not cool when you think you should be a badass killing machine with a vendetta.

Graphics are great but I still have to wonder why the fuck do they have to use prerenderent cut-scenes when you could have just used the great looking game engine. Also some of the cut-scenes have been done with the engine but they have been prerendered poorly so they look like a shitty version of the game itself. This is a sin that a lot of game companies still do. I guess it goes back to the nineties when it was cool to have state of the art cutscenes or intro videos that looked nothing like the game. And then they used screenshots of the cut scenes on the game boxes and everyone was disappointed by the time the actual game started. But now the graphics in the games are so advanced that why spend money on weird prerendered stuff. It totally ruins the mood and overall coherence of the game. At least GTA does this right.

So to sum it up Splinter Cell Conviction was a fun ride but it still has a lot of flaws. I'm kind of hoping they do a Conviction 2 and focus on just being a pissed of merc and just leave out all the dumb levels. There's no way anyone should rate this higher than 8/10.