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![]() The menu and mode integration with character interactions also makes Blacklist feel a little like an open-world game. That's meant as the highest of compliments, by the way. It all feels a bit like Mass Effect, where the protagonist traverses his or her ship in an effort to establish ties with comrades. But the team members eventually coalesce as they overcome perils together and their interactions become more congenial as the game progresses. As a lone wolf operative who is uncomfortable leading a group, Fisher's manner at the beginning of the game is brusk. The conversations also deepen the teammates' relationships. Sidekick Isaac Briggs, meanwhile, also has co-op missions in store, but he can also apprise the Fourth Echelon leader of his in-game status and statistics. The modifications confer in-game benefits, such as better on-the-ground radar readings from improved sensors. Long-time regular Anna Grimsdottir, also known as Grim, for example, lets Fisher upgrade the Paladin with the credits he earns across game modes. He can also visit different sections of the plane and talk to his quartet of teammates, each of whom offer information, the ability to launch different co-op missions and other personalized options. A mysterious new group known as the Engineers has announced its intentions to destroy a number of American targets – the titular Blacklist – unless troops are pulled out of certain countries.įrom the SMI, Fisher can dive into a host of different play options, from the main single-player storyline and co-operative missions to the multiplayer Spies versus Mercs mode, with each scattered around a map of the world. There, they take in intel and discuss how to deal with rapidly escalating terrorist developments. In game mechanic terms, it's the menu screen from just about every game ever made, but brought to a sort of virtual life.įisher and his teammates congregate around the Strategic Mission Interface (SMI), a touch-screen tabletop command centre housed in the middle of the Paladin. Story-wise, the aircraft serves as the mobile headquarters of Fourth Echelon, the super-spy's ultra-secret, anti-terrorist special forces group. The straight-line aspect of the game, the first effort from the Ubisoft Toronto studio, only becomes apparent if you really stop to think about it.Īt the core of this well-disguised illusion is Fisher's new base of operations, a giant, technologically tricked-out cargo plane known as the Paladin. While the new Splinter Cell: Blacklist is definitely not an open-world game – it's actually hard to imagine the franchise straying that far from its roots – it is a fantastic hybrid of sorts that throws so many options and choices at the player that its linear nature is thoroughly hidden if not forgotten entirely. It's why open-world games, where players can effectively do whatever they want at their own speed, have become so popular in the past few years, and why we're seeing a steady raft of them being released. Sure, there were usually different routes and possibilities for him along the way, but in the end the games played pretty much the same for anyone who attempted them.īut video games are supposed to be a medium that – uniquely among entertainment offerings – affords consumers with agency, so the idea of being dragged through one by the invisible hand of its developer will inevitably become archaic if not quaint. In each of the series' five previous main entries, super-spy Sam Fisher has indeed been tasked with getting from one point at the beginning of a level to another at the end of it. ![]() Games in the "Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell" family have historically leaned toward such linear experiences. These are, of course, the types of games where players must go from point A to point B, with few choices or different outcomes in between. There will come a day in the not-too-distant future when we will all wonder why we ever enjoyed linear video games. |
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