I am not a real journalist nor am i a professional….but here goes!

             Let me say that I have played none of the other games in the Splinter Cell franchise (besides the 15 seconds I played the first one), but I will judge this game solely on its own merit. LET IT BEGIN

            You play as Sam Fisher a top-secret spy man who is looking for the person or people who killed his daughter. Sam used to work for Third Echelon, but now they have the information about his daughter and she might not be dead after all. The plot gets a little muddled around the middle, the game assumes you have played through EVERY OTHER Splinter Cell game because there isn’t even a decent recap. Never the less, who cares about story we are here to get our sneaky spy murdering on.

            The game relies primarily on stealth, because unlike most video game protagonists such as Master Chief, the guy from Gears of War, and the Call of Duty series, if Sam is shot more than twice he drops dead, which adds a degree of difficulty to the game and also makes your blood pressure spike.

 The gun controls take some getting used to, its mostly cover based shooting with gadgets of such quantity, it could embarrass James Bond, but once you have it down it is fairly easy to kill with one shot to the head. You can also grab a guard and hold him like a shield while you shoot his friends, which is always fun for me, mostly because you get to snap their neck when you are done with them. The game fades the color to black and white when you are in shadows or invisible to the enemy. It’s a nice effect its just when all your enemies wear black and the color fades out it becomes a little difficult to see them. Also the game gives you a handy little danger indicator to alert you when enemies can see you and which direction you are being shot from.

            All right, I have to mention this: There are forced stealth sections where you cannot let cameras see you, guards see you, let a camera see a corpse, or let a guard find a corpse. The first time I encountered one of the sections I tried it fifty times and literally ended up smashing my controller against the wall and breaking it, while screams of rage could be heard the neighborhood over.

My anger issues aside however I would say Splinter Cell:  Conviction is a solid game for fans of the franchise, but even if you’re a newbie to Splinter Cell there is still a lot to enjoy in this game. So my final score is: 7.5 out of 10.

/Booth