The company behind Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time™, Beyond Good & Evil, and Tom Clancy’s … well, everything, continues to turn out brilliant games a breakneck speed. And, they’re not content to rest on the deserved laurels of 2003. Now Ubi Soft Montreal revisits the espionage super spy that made it an Xbox darling in the stealth-action sequelTom Clancy’s Splinter Cell® Pandora Tomorrow™. Sam Fisher is leaving the ventilation shafts—mostly—for outdoor settings in brand-new environments. He’s learned a few new moves and perfected all his original tricks, including an all-new multiplayer mode for full-on Xbox Live play, which practically guarantees that thisCell will be an even bigger hit than the first.
Sam Fisher is back to his infiltrating tricks.
I Will Not Make a Pandora’s Box Pun The latest Splinter Cell opens up a Pandora’s box of trouble (oops) for our man Fisher. The story line is being kept tightly under wraps, but we can tell you that Sam’s latest adventure will find him moving out of industrial, urban environments and into a jungle-type location, where the bad guys wear badder Hawaiian shirts, and he’ll turn John McClane for a mission at LAX. He’s also headed to Europe, where he’ll have to infiltrate a moving train to nab an international terrorist. Settings like this allow Ubi Soft Montreal to show off Pandora Tomorrow’s refined graphics engine, which (though almost inconceivably) improves on the original’s groundbreaking look.
The Sam will come outTomorrow.
Solo Sam All of Sam’s old abilities have been left more or less intact, with a few new additions that will serve him well in the never-ending struggle to save the free world. Sam can now perform a quick-pivot move that lets him slip past open doors unseen; hang from pipes, bat-style, to get the drop on evildoers; and a slightly tweaked take on the split-jump that’s smoother than before. The standard pistol now includes a laser sight (don’t let the bad guys spot the red light), and Sam’s inventory includesRS3-style flashbangs and chaff grenades. Even the standard optical cable has gotten a vision upgrade and can “see” in the same alternate modes (Night Vision and Thermal Vision) as Fisher himself.
Online gamers will enjoy a brilliant multiplayer mode.
Sam Fisher Live So, how do you make Splinter Cell even better, after you’ve added new graphics, locations, and moves? How about a full-on XboxLive multiplayer mode? Multiplayer is limited to only four players (even on the broadband-powered Xbox Liveservice), but there’s a good reason. Taking a page from the Counter-Strike™ for Xbox playbook, two players are spies—cyborg-looking generic Sam Fishers—while two others play mercenaries (according to the developers, anything more just turns into an old-fashioned deathmatch, which isn’t what they’re going for). Players going in as spies will get the fullSplinter Cell complement of stealth abilities and a third-person view, while the mercs will be played from a first-person perspective (to simulate a “cone of vision,” ala the guards in Metal Gear Solid) and pack much more lethal hardware. Though full multiplayer is still being refined, we’ve gotten word of three modes that will be up and running for XboxLive: Neutralization, where the spies must reach an objective and the mercenaries simply try to stop them; the more CTF-like Extraction, in which the spies must nab their objective and then get it away from the mercenaries; and Sabotage, a game that’s similar to Counter-Strike’s demolition mode—spies have to plant a communications device and then defend it for a set period while the mercs try to switch it off.
They’re in the stretch … and it’s Ubi Soft by a mile!
