Nick plays games

What you think of Conviction is going to depend largely on what other games you’ve played. If you take it on its own merits and don’t consider the previous four games in the series, it’s not bad at all. It’s a mixed bag, with solid controls and an interesting cover and light/darkness system that are held back by brain-dead writing and a largely tertiary story. But the most significant problem is that the soul of Splinter Cell has, appropriately enough, vanished without a trace.

Splinter Cell was the original Tactical Espionage Action game, despite whatever Metal Gear Solid may have billed itself as. Sam wasn’t a cold killer; he was equipped to be invisible and to execute high-stakes missions without being discovered. A few bullets would drop him, and his health wouldn’t regenerate. Sure, the original games were flawed as well — the emphasis on trial-and-error gameplay meant that there were some borderline-impossible sequences that utterly disrupted the flow of the game — but they stuck to a singular vision and delivered an experience that was distinct from all the other military action games on the market. Patience, tactics and planning took precedence over aiming ability and hand-to-hand proficiency. It was different, but it was inspired. It’s no wonder that, despite all the flaws, the early Splinter Cell games (particularly the original and the third, Chaos Theory) are held in such high esteem.

Conviction is not Splinter Cell. Conviction is Sam Fisher starring in an entirely different genre of game. Gone are the carefully planned infiltrations, the bevy of gadgets and the engaging characters who reveal themselves through their oft-humorous and believable conversations over radio channels. Instead, you’ve got a game that plays more like a combination of Batman: Arkham Asylum, with its sensation of being powerful when hidden in the shadows, and Gears of War’s run-and-gun, cover-based shootouts.

Don’t get the wrong impression; it’s a really fun game. As I mentioned earlier, the story is unacceptably hackneyed for such a big-budget game from a major developer, but that doesn’t change the fact that its core cat-and-mouse style of gameplay is a blast. But it’s also an epitaph for the Sam Fisher of old, and by forsaking its roots so significantly it feels less like an evolution of a great series and more like a response to other companies’ financially successful ventures into the modern third-person, cover-based action blockbusters.

But Ubisoft seems to have forgotten that Sam’s not a follower. And that’s what makes Conviction more of a betrayal of a beloved concept than a bold step into the world of modern game design.