![]() ![]() In order to stop a hack, mercenaries have to find the spy that started the process and kill them. #SPLINTER CELL BLACKLIST FIRST PERSON SERIES#At its most basic, spies race to hack nodes that mercenaries have to defend – but a series of clever design decisions prevent it from feeling like any other type of capture point multiplayer. #SPLINTER CELL BLACKLIST FIRST PERSON UPGRADE#Spies vs mercenaries multiplayer makes a return, with a classic 2 vs 2 mode as well as 4 vs 4 incorporating upgrade trees and unlockable classes and everything else expected of a modern game. And it's magic because it plugs Sam Fisher into the game's multiplayer, which is where Blacklist picks itself up out of mediocrity and claims a bit of magic for itself. It's magic because it allows you to travel backwards in time to play older missions, a necessity of Blacklist's highscore-chasing metagame. It's magic because it provides whatever information the team needs to progress in the plot, whenever they need it. SMI means 'Sam's Magic iPad', if you were wondering. Whenever you begin the game from this point on you load directly onto the airborne Paladin and conduct the rest of your business via the SMI, a massive onboard table computer. It's sort of a tutorial, but it's skippable and most of the work of getting you up to speed is done once it's over. When you begin the campaign for the first time you pick a difficulty level and launch directly into the lengthy opening cutscene, which is followed by a brief mission. This is a heartless story, about unaccountable violent people doing unaccountable violent things. The performances are more dynamic in general, but I missed the heart Michael Ironside brought to Fisher. About half of the Splinter Cell cast reprise their old roles, and the new Fisher is visibly and audibly 35-ish in a way that confuses the game's insistence that he's pushing 50. Fans of the genre will note that the principal threat is not an EMP, for once, but is something rather a lot like an EMP. This is a Tom Clancy story, and therefore it is about some government people, their gadgets, and a series of politically motivated explosions whose grounding in real politics is conveniently woolly in the way that a flock of sheep resting at the bottom of a slippery slope is conveniently woolly. Lethal or non-lethal is a high-score decision, rendering toothless the infrequent moments when you're asked if you're willing to spare a life. ![]() But Blacklist leans on its scoring system to provide you with consequences for the way you choose to play: the main narrative doesn't respond to your choices at all. ![]() Panther is similar but you're allowed to kill people, and Assault is for people who would rather be playing a shooter. Ghost means slipping by undetected and non-lethally subduing guards you can't avoid. Flawless stealth is an exercise in gruelling trial-and-error.Įvery mission in the game can be repeated for points, which are assigned based on your performance in one of three categories: Ghost, Panther,and Assault. This turns features that should be positive – like the guard patrols that vary from run to run – into crushing negatives. There's no checkpointing, and Blacklist has no mid-mission save system. Another set, however, resets you to the start of the mission if you're ever detected. One set, where you're asked to clear areas of enemies before progressing, offers a good balance of stealth and action and rewards creativity. Optional side missions unlocked by speaking to Sam's crew are playable in solo and co-op modes and present you with open areas that promise to fix the campaign's problems. Not so – you have to repeat it until you do it perfectly. Logically, you might assume that if you screw up then the subsequent stealth section will become harder. There's the obligatory bit where you escape from a burning building, and an early mission begins with a sniper section where you must eliminate enemies in the right order to allow Fisher to progress. Awkward, hand-holdy sections like this are the game's other great weakness. ![]()
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