Splinter Cell is good. It's very good, in fact. It takes the idea of being a one man stealth army, and throws out the idea of holding millions of weapons in your pants pocket, bisexual vampires, techno-ninjas, and girly-man main characters that look like they missed the Final Fantasy auditions. In its stead, it grounds your stealth ops firmly in reality, where an agent is more likely to use a mini-recording device than a stinger missile. Sadly though, Splinter Cell also takes away one big option integral to the stealth genre: your freedom to do things as you choose.
You're Sam Fisher, and you don't exist. You're also one bad ass mama jamma. When the government wants something out, but doesn't want anybody to know they went in to get it, that's when they send you in. Sam has more moves than your average ninja, and like your average ninja, you'll need to use them all just in order to say out of sight of your foes. This is not Metal Gear Solid, where sneaking around is nice, cool, etc; but you can often handle the situation if caught snooping. In Splinter Cell, if you're spotted, you're more often than not screwed, unless you can neutralize the situation in a confined area, with no other guards around. Later, when you get Sam's rifle, it becomes easier to take out more guards and enemies, but you'll still be in trouble if you try to play it Rambo-style. It just can't be done. Many stealth games have made the claim of forcing players to use their heads instead of their weapons, but Splinter Cell is the first to actually do so.
Splinter Cell is like a feast for both the eyes and ears. The graphics feature the best lighting and shadow rendering in any game, ever. Awesome night vision and thermal vision effects soar way over any benchmark ever posed by any title, ever. As cliché as it sounds, the game truly must be seen to be believed. Even the characters themselves have fluid animation and great facial expressions for the most part, but there are a few moves that almost seem to have had the animations left out: for example, when Sam climbs over a railing and drops down, he stands on the railing, and "floats" over to the edge, before dropping on the other side. That just seems really unnatural, and knocks you out of the immersion every time you do it. The audio is right on, however, with spot-on perfection from the voice actors for Sam and Lambert, and the majority of the supporting cast. Only the field runner Wilkes stands out as someone who shouldn't have made it past rehearsals.
A few more problems keep Splinter Cell from fully realizing its promise: the most glaring of these are the rather stiff controls, and the fact the game is completely linear: sure, it gives you lots of cool things to do while going from point A to B, but with the exception of twice, I never felt I truly had a choice in the game as to how to approach the situation. It was more like I needed to figure out the best way to shoot out the lights, the guards, or just avoid both. The later levels begin to become more about trial and error than collecting recon, staying silent, and using force only when you deem it necessary. This is a shame, since this is when Splinter Cell is at its best.
You can't really go wrong with Splinter Cell, as it's a great game, and a great start to what will hopefully be a long running franchise. Here's hoping though, that some of the key problems holding it back from being a true classic are addressed in the follow up.
-George
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