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By Ryan McCaffrey, Assistant Editor, Official Xbox Magazine
Part of what makes my job the best in the world is the fact that I not only get to play games for a living, but I get to play them well in advance of the general public. Thus, I started playing Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell® Chaos Theory™ again recently, since it's now available to everyone. I took another, more trigger-happy play-through on the single-player game, and now I can stop beating up on my fellow Official Xbox Magazine editors and start getting my face handed to me on Xbox Live® by you guys.
Surprise! You're dead.
The first thing I did when I received my final retail copy, though, was call upon my good friend Will, who was anxious to play through Chaos Theory's awesome four-mission cooperative campaign. I happily obliged, and we took an entire weekend sneaking through the levels, taking our sweet time (on average, we spent about 90 minutes on each map). We each agreed that it was easily the best co-op gameplay either of us had ever experienced, ranking right up there with the classic PC co-op days of DOOM 1and 2, Heretic, and Hexen. We can only hope that the always-supportive folks at Ubisoft will provide an additional cooperative mission or two via Xbox Live.
The Versus mode, which debuted in last year's Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell® Pandora Tomorrow™, is (as I've written in this space many times before) unlike anything else out there. And, while the offering last year was a bold experiment that paid off in spades, the designers have nevertheless corrected several balancing issues. Spies can now perform cooperative moves, such as the "man ladder" (as Will and I call it), where one spy cups his hand and gives the other a boost, and the boost-ee then hangs there and lets his buddy scale him to get to the top of the ledge. In fact, some of the objectives in the maps can only be reached this way.
Discovering a spy's work.
Speaking of the maps, they are, in fact, the biggest new star of the show. A whopping 11 maps are available out of the box, with six of them brand new and the other five being some of the best fromPandora Tomorrow. And the new maps are stunning, carefully designed playgrounds that will take a while to fully explore, but the effort is well worth it. Factory, in particular, is a sprawling piece of architecture with three massive rooms connected by dark, camera-laden hallways. Various ducts and pipes run between it all, and there's even a room where Spies can use an earth-mover to knock down a brick wall! Can you say "sign me up?"
Livin' Live Of course, something has had to suffer for the time our group has spent falling in love with Chaos Theory, and that game is Halo® 2. Make no mistake, however: Instead of playing it for hours every night, it now gets a still-healthy 60 minutes each evening. We still love you, Halo 2.
Tip of the Week In Chaos Theory's Versus mode, be sure to tell your partner to wait for your "clear" indication before jumping down into various places. That way, you'll avoid embarrassingly knocking your buddy unconscious.
