Splinter Cell casts a spell
Some people you can always rely on. Until now we’ve been darn sure Splinter Cell’s Sam Fisher is one of them. Put another way, you’d never question Sam’s motives to his face else you might walk away with an entirely different mug of your own.
In Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Double Agent, however, Sam has clearly turned Double Agent. In fact we’d risk our pretty noses on it. Sam still goes about his business as a kick ass covert operative, but now he’s gotten involved with terrorists too. Which means that in every situation Sam must choose who to save and who to kill, but you can bet this is only a hard line route to the truth.
Sam’s decisions become yours – choosing between terrorist objectives or those apparently more worthy of Sam’s employers, the NSA. Every step of the way you must weigh up the odds, often with lives at stake, and your decisions take immediate effect on the storyline plus gameplay objectives, then ultimately how this razor’s edge mission ends. So you thought you knew Sam and Splinter Cell inside out, huh?
Behind closed doors at the Leipzig GC, Ubisoft is demoing three scenarios: Iceland is where Sam’s mission begins, breaking into a geothermal power plant. In fact, the establishment hides a terrorist missile silo belonging to John Brown’s Army (JBA), a US terrorist organisation led by Emile Dufraisne. Next up is the Sea of Okhotsk, Eastern Russia where a cargo tanker is caught in an ice floe. This particular scene is a great showcase of the game’s extreme weather conditions, with a spectacular winter storm raging on deck. More boat-based JBA quandaries are encountered later on a cruise liner in Cozumel, just off the coast of Mexico.
On the show floor at Leipzig, consumers are dumped into the heart of Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo. Here Sam must keep his head (literally!) in the midst of an active civil war raging in the streets.
Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Double Agent is due for Xbox 360 in October, with an age rating expected to be PEGI 18+. We can hardly wait.
