Hardcore Stealth in the Daylight

Everything hardcore about Splinter Cell is found in that breathless moment before you snatch an enemy unawares; that taut-with-tension second when you wonder if they'll see or hear you, if there's another guard lurking that you didn't see, or an alarm, sentry gun, or camera that you failed to notice. When a game makes you hold your breath till your lungs begin to burst you know you hold quality in your hand.

Dressed for the occasion.

What's more, the Splinter Cell series offers that unique game design that doesn't just provide opportunities for hardcore challenges, but nearly taunts you with them. If the moment before the kill is tense, the moments with no kill are even more so; that self inflicted challenge to complete a level wholly unseen is fraught with worry and the need for rare skill.

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Double Agent is no different, and, in fact excels further into hardcore territory by daring Sam Fisher to employ his spy-wares in the harsh glare of daylight and asking him to succeed in maintaining honor in the midst of deep cover with a terrorist cell. If the game o'natural isn't hardcore enough, try this challenges on for size.

Aggressive spies are dead spies and fly
directly in the face of the game's intent.

Stealth Employed
Out from the shadows and into the daylight goes Sam Fisher in Double Agent as several missions take place in the daytime this go 'round. Combined with a distinct lack of high-tech gear, this may seem like Sam's opportunity to shed a little blood in a more forthright manner. Wrong! What it is, is the perfect time to perfect your stealth skills. Find a way to sneak through missions sans the shadows and night vision and you truly are a ghost.

Spirit of the Game
If you need to get your aggression out, play Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, don't embarrass yourself by running around like a newb with its head cut off as a spy in Double Agent's multiplayer. Aggressive spies are dead spies and fly directly in the face of the game's intent. Don't neuter the fun and brand yourself a jackass; instead, convert wins via stealth, strategy, unceasing communication with your teammates and laser precision execution.

Ah…prison.

Mission Only
Sam Fisher walks a fine line and his mission objectives speak to fundamentally specific goals and targets. Your goal, if you choose to accept it is to focus purely on the targets you're given, and no one else. Unless absolutely unavoidable, nothing and no one should know you were there and no one should be dead unless you were explicitly ordered to kill them.

Walk the Line
Double Agent will ask the near impossible of Sam Fisher. It will ask him to maintain loyalty, maintain honor while acting under deep cover as a cold-blooded terrorist. To speak directly to the decisions you will need to make would be to ruin the fun, but know that the most hardcore element of Double Agent will be the instant decisions you will need to make while trying to maintain legitimacy with both sides (the NSA and your terrorist cell). What's more, as a hardcore gamer, I implore you to play over none of the "directed moments" found within the game. Live with each heart-rending decision you make.

Make your decision and live with the consequences.

Handicap Online
From Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow to Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, the versus mode online has been heralded as some of the most intelligent, intense, and tactically impressive online modes ever offered. It also might be the most difficult to learn. Take even a seasoned gamer and introduce them to Chaos Theory now after everyone has had a year to play it, and their frustration level will burn bright as they suffer ignominious loss after ignominious loss.

To that end, allow yourself to judge your opponents playing full bore for one round, but if they're skill is at a low ebb, it's time to handicap yourself. Here are a few suggestions:

• Don't use grenades or the drone (at the very least, don't use the drone as a bomb) as a mercenary.
• Let the spies get a free objective as a mercenary.
• Don't choke the mercenary as a spy, even if they're dull-witted enough to stand in-place with their back turned to you.
• Don't use smoke grenades as a spy.

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Double Agent is a hardcore gamer's dream as each moment reeks of that sweet brutality of difficulty. The drama is intense—the directed moments almost heartbreakingly so—the action requires intense skill to be played correctly, and the online versus is tactical competition at its very finest.

Article by Hardcore