Splinter Cell Conviction (PC)

I wrote this review in 2010 when the game came out but never published it until now.

8/10

Good game. Different from the other Splinter Cell games. Splinter Cell Conviction is a stealth third person shooter.

In single player, when you start a mission enemies are usually unaware of you and from there you can either try to remain undetected and take them down silently or engage in cover/shoot fire fights. You can only take a few bullets before you die but if you hide for a little while your health comes back. "Hit and run" works well for this reason and because enemies will loose track of you if you hide after they lost sight of you. Taking down an enemy in melee give you points that you can use to "Mark and Execute" enemies. That is, you mark a small group of unsuspecting targets in your sight or through one of your gadgets and when you press the execute button the character takes them down in a small animation. You are not invincible while "executing" but it might be more effective than what you can do with your own skills. Also some enemies with an helmet which take two bullets in the head to be killed require only one bullet if "executing" and guns which only shoot in bursts will shoot one bullet in the animation. I think that if you would try to shoot that fast when you are in control, it would not guaranty your kills because there is a loss of accuracy between consecutive shots. On an other subject, there are "interrogation" scenes (which I'm not a fan of) where you get to destroy the face of some key enemy characters. There is on level in the game where your mission fails if you get detected before you enter the main area. Soon after that there is an automatic save, a 2 minute animation, and then you have 2 seconds to react and then you have a few seconds to kill some guards and go through a set of doors. And if you fail at any point, you go back before the cut-scene The most annoying part in the game.

On PC the multiplayer is lacking several features. No chat lobby. No list of games. No chat when all players must click ready before the game can start. There is automatic match making but: when the game launched there was no voice chat in game. In coop, cooperation is needed and there was no way players could communicate. No way to tell your random friend "Hey come back here idiot we need to both be there to complete that objective!". People would fire in the walls. Write on the floor with their guns. Pathetic. Fortunately they fixed the "no voice chat" issue on PC with a patch. But to my knowledge there is still no keyboard chat. The multiplayer part of the game was probably made for Xbox Live and they did not care much about PC. Also every time I start the game, it forgets some settings like invert mouse, and there is no way to change it once the multiplayer game is started. Also multiplayer is limited to 2 players. The multiplayer part of the game can be a lot of fun but because it is lacking basic features you can't seriously consider it a multiplayer game. (I would rate that part of the game 3/10)