My Day Will Come

Warning: This game requires patience.  If you have none, stay away. It’s not a straight shooter.

If you’ve ever wanted to be as badass, cunning, and ruthless as Jack Bauer in a video game, Splinter Cell Conviction is the game for you.  Do you want to act out one (or several) of Jack Bauer’s famous interrogation scenes?  Done.  There are almost an excessive number of situations for you to brutally ask bad guys where stuff is.  Conviction’s situation is a departure from previous games in the series.  Longtime protagonist Sam Fisher is not ostensibly working with any sort of government agency.  For most of the game Fisher’s only contact with “the good guys” is with a woman he used to work with in the government.  Sound familiar?

I loved the way new objectives are presented to you in this game.  Many have called the way the game projects text onto the game world “Fringe Lettering” (yes, referring to the JJ Abrams show).  I’d say it goes a bit further, as the show’s lettering is limited to large block letters hanging in mid air introducing new locations.  Conviction goes a step further and blends the text into walls and objects in the world seamlessly.  More games need to do this.

Diehard Splinter Cell fans lamented the loss of certain gameplay elements such as hiding bodies.  I found it refreshing.  Hiding bodies always felt like a chore, rather than “ooh, this is cool because it’s realistic.”  Fisher has a new trick called “Execution” where you can mark anywhere between 2-4 targets (depending on how much you’ve upgraded your gun) and can instantly kill them all with one button if you are within line of sight. It’s balanced since you have to “earn” the right to do this by successfully melee killing someone.  While some critics may complain this cheapens the gameplay, at the end of the day, it serves to make the player feel like a badass.  I’m ok with this.  I want to be the action hero I see in the final cut of film. I’m ok with cutting out “realistic” elements for more fun.

Broken down into its core elements, Conviction is a sequence of situations in which Sam Fisher has to deal with bad guys who don’t know he’s there.  Usually, I’d start off trying to take out everyone stealthily from the shadows.  I’m not one for elaborate planning, so invariably I’d get seen, shit would hit the fan, and I’d have to shoot my way out of the mess.  Oftentimes this would end in failure, but since I’m an above-average shooter player, I imagine I brute-forced my way through more than most players would. Generally, Conviction does a good job of preventing you from just run and gunning your way through the game, as a veritable clown bus of bad guys will swarm you if you try to do this. (Protip: There are always more dudes in the room than you think there are.)

I played through the single-player campaign through on “Realistic” difficulty.  I usually play most games on normal difficulty, but I strongly recommend that you play this game on “Realistic” if you do.  Playing through on anything less will give you far more leeway to run and gun your way through the game and I think that detracts from the experience. The most memorable moments you will have while playing will be the stealth kills and planned gadget kills, not the machinegun kills you get from playing Call of Duty style.

My favorite moment in the game was a planned attack where I planted a remote explosive on the ground next to a pair of armed guards.  I scaled the building to their right, overlooking another guard from behind.  Jumping down, I broke the neck of the hapless guard from behind.  The original pair saw this and began to run towards me.  Calmly, I pressed the button, detonated the explosive, and took out the remaining guards LIKE A BOSS.

The biggest complaint people have of Conviction is the “insta-fail” section well-into the game.  I can’t defend this; it’s some bullshit.  I’d like to think there’s a better solution to forcing players to act in a stealthy manner.  However, part of the reason I got through it with minimal yelling at the screen was due to my Realistic difficulty training.  By the time I got to the chapter in question, I was already used to basically “insta-failing” if I was detected (due to the immense swarms of enemies and inability to absorb much gunfire).  It still sucked, though, because I could do everything right except for one tiny mistake, and I’d be forced to reload a checkpoint. Perhaps a better way of enforcing this would be to elevate the difficulty level to Realistic for everyone, regardless of what they are playing at.  It’ll train the player to be more stealthy, but also give them the feeling that they could progress even if they make a mistake.

It’ll take a certain type of mindset to succeed and have fun with Conviction.  You need to be prepared to be methodical and inconspicuous.  If you can and are willing to do this, I guarantee you will have a great time with this game.