Splinter Cell: Conviction - Cooperative Experience

[Grayswandir]

A friend of mine brought over Splinter Cell: Conviction yesterday, so we spent the night blasting Mexican terrorists or whatever they were (Honestly, we didn't listen to the storyline, we were just running around making a mess of everyone and everything that looked like we could kill it).

Personally, I like Splinter Cell games, since I played the first one for Xbox all the way up to when my friend and I played Chaos Theory with split screen cooperative...Then Double Agent came along and felt like a complete step backwards. There was something about Double Agent that felt wrong, although I never played the Splinter Cell games for their multiplayer (unless it was coop...Double Agent was missing split-screen for some reason), Double Agent felt akward. While there were stealth missions, the days of sneaking around in dark buildings and snapping people's necks (although, really, you got more points for not killing or touching anyone...Splinter Cell was a fucking anal series). Instead you had missions running around under the sun and firefights with loud guns. You also spent a lot of your time trying to complete side-quests that proved that you were an evil terrorist to your evil buddies but you were still a good guy to the good guys....yeah, it was convoluted and I felt it didn't really mesh well.

Well, I finally got to play Conviction (I was really on the fence about this one, I almost preordered it but decided against it), and I have to say, for me, its a mixed bag. A mixed bag of awesome moments, but still, a mixed bag. I can't say anything about the single player, but playing with another live human being and working as a team to take out all the baddies is quite fun.

For those of you that have played a Tom Clancy game, the controls are like what you'd get if Rainbow Six Vegas and Splinter Cell had an illegitimate baby. The controls are fairly easy to get a hang of, although I found myself throwing grenades on accident more often than I wanted. Many of the actions are context sensitive, which means you'll be using the A and B buttons quite a bit. A for jumping over objects and moving between hiding spots, and B for snapping terrorist neck with your hands (or for anything abusive). The Left Trigger sticks you against objects and automatically crouches you behind cover. Unfortunately, this can be a bit of a problem in some of the cooperative levels where you have to escape by helicopter and "press A to grab rope" is right on top of "press A to jump over ledge". Or when, "Press A to turn off lights" is right next to "Press A to pick up gun" You get the picture.

One of the more important new aspects of Conviction was this auto-targetting, auto-killing mechanic. You get points for this ability by sneakily killing enemies with your hands and then you can target objects, people, cars, chandeliers, etc, and press Y to make your agent do this slow-motion auto-kill/fire move and kill a group of people in succession. While yes, this is very un-Splinter Cell like, it makes for some fun and cool looking room entrances. They also added in some brutal interrogations. In the older games, you'd chokehold someone, put your knife to their throat, and whisper amusing anecdotes to them while squeezing their hand painfully when they said something you didn't like. Now...now, you grab them by the throat, drag them over to a fridge, knee them in the goats, kick them into the fridge, and slam their head in the door. After that you drag them over to a bookshelf and run their head along the shelves before slamming them face first into the edge of a shelf and kicking them in the ass. If they still haven't given you the information you want, you then drag them over to a metal safe and kick their head repeatedly into the reinforced door. Need I go on? What you do is all based on the enviroment and you as the player. You can press your poor soul into objects and press B and you'll start beating them against it automatically. if you just press B, you'll punish their face with your hands. If it looks like a viable, hard object, you can most likely use it in a painful, rather violent way.

They've removed a few aspects from the older games in the series. You can no longer pick up small objects and throw them to make noise and you can't whistle anymore (I miss the whistle, it was fun...). Splinter Cell has moved away from stealth and sneaking to stealth and stalking. All the moves you can do are geared towards hiding in the shadows and getting the jump on your targets. Almost all the equipment you can get (in cooperative at least), is lethal. They've also mixd dragging bodies in with the chokehold ability. Yep, you can no longer drag corpses around (from what I've seen), but you can chokehold someone and drag them unwillingly around as a shield or to a safe area to do your dirty work.

Now I suppose after all this tl;dr, the main question is, "Is it fun to play?". The rush you get after successfully taking out a large group of enemies without being spotted or setting off alarms is one of those "Fuck yes, high five!" moments. My answer is, yes, with a few hiccups in the level design, the gameplay and the cooperative experience make it worthwhile to pick up.

...I should probably just make a blog instead of posting huge threads here.