(Title: Splinter Cell Trilogy - remastered in HD)
Setting: Korea, Japan, U.S.
Graphics: Big step up from the first two remastered games. It impressed me almost as much as Deus Ex for the Playstation 2 on my 34 cm colour TV! It often looks terrific
like a PS3 generation game, although some of the character modelling still looks PS2 standard. The bad guys often have a sleepwalker/zombie/Cliff Young shuffle to their walk, although it slightly improves later on in the game. Very impressive visuals. Sam Fisher also looks different in the game, as you play him
he seems bigger on the screen, so there is some adjustment to the new look of the game.
Sound: Didn't notice it too much, but it is annoying how the sound you make in the game alerts the bad guys
in a silly way
e.g. if you creep to fast, e.g. a lighthouse on a stormy, windy day, the guy inside, on the ham radio will hear you! Hmm. Stuff like that.
Good about the game: * I don't usually give credit to Ubisoft, finding their games sucky in one way or another, but big plaudits to them for the way that you gave revisit any mission you've played and try and improve your % score. That gives replayability to the game. I replayed a few missions or parts of missions in order to unlock trophies and it did not affect my score in bad ways. E.g. I had one save for the very end of the game and I went redid an earlier mission to get the trophy for getting at least 80% in every mission. I did that, and when I went back to my end game save, all my later mission successes were not altered, so I got my trophy. Not sure if that cuts both ways
I'd hate to do WORSE in a replayed mission and have that show up on your save for the finale
especially if you did not save that replay.
* I actually had fun early on in the game coming to grips with the new look and feel of the game. I'd laugh if I got into trouble with the bad guys as I was adjusting to the new dynamics of the game.
* Humour is back in the game. There are some 'cute' easter eggs too, I suppose that you would call them
checker boards with 5 black and 5 red squares for each side; TV screens showing promos for the previous Splinter Cell game (the apartment mission, I think). The security firm mission has a newspaper mentioning Ubisoft! Sometimes you get a Vincent Price type voice saying "Darkness" when you endarken an area.
Bad about the game: * Has some bugs like: quickloading a game can quit the game! The game seems to save more than once sometimes when you save
either that or there is delay between you saving and the game acting on it
so that you are surprised when the game stops to save. This could potentially be very bad
as in you saving when you are in good position and the game acting on that when you are bad position
you might find yourself in an impossible spot and need to restart the entire mission again. Fortunately, this never happened to me.
* Stupid trophies! Loads of trophies for just basically playing the mission or the game. I got sucked in to a certain extent (e.g. one for getting at least 80% score for every mission) but some I just can't be bothered chasing.
* There is a new sound meter which shows how much noise you are making
it's unrealistic.
* In the apartment mission, once you reach the helicopter, the noise of that helicopter keeps going, even after you have moved across the road
and inside another building! Just annoying to hear that noise.
* The game has bodies to find. Not sure what the Hell that is all about. If there's a trophy in it, I can't be bothered with it. One body that I found was actually invisible, initially! WTF? All rather silly, really.
* Sam dying when he doesn't auto-grab edges.
Misjudgements in the game: * The BIG one: the horrible hacking mode in the game. It is utterly baffling! When I did manage to hack a computer or whatever, it felt quite random
I had no idea why it worked. You really need to be able to do this in the game. Eventually I consulted the training tutorial for this (I pretty much knew how to do everything else or could work it out myself
which is GOOD about games!) but that wasn't much help. Had to go online for the trick to hacking. It's mind numbingly simple once you know how to do it. It's just a pity that it's so incomprehensible to work it out or have useful advice in the tutorial video to help you. I actually had FUN with the game once I knew the trick to hacking
getting to actually enjoy the gameplay! How about that? For the unitiated, the hacking puzzle just overloads you with information which I found impossible to process
the number of online tips proves that the system is not intuitive
bad, in other words. Some verbal tips in the training video on what buttons to press would have helped
there were a lot of visual clues which weren't obvious
to much information to process. Useless.
General observations:
The best game of the trilogy. You can see the seeds of some of the features I hate in Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed series here. Would have liked to have known why missions didn't get 100% even when I thought I did everything required. 10-20 hours worth of play over 10 missions
10 for replays once you know the drill.
