Review: Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Essentials (PSP)

The intriguing premise of Splinter Cell Essentials does little more than set it up for a fall. Sam Fisher has been arrested for the murder of his former commander and, in an attempt to clear his name, retells the events of his past. Are you on the edge of your seat yet? What follows is a lazy mish-mash of missions, some new, some from the previous games - none really suited to the format, for many reasons which should have been apparent during development.

The most glaringly obvious one is that the PSP lacks a second analogue stick. Since Splinter Cells of the past have all featured a virtually perfect third person camera fully operated by the second stick, its removal is a massive hurdle to overcome. Your choices are either: hold down a button to switch to "camera mode", sacrificing movement; or toggle the face buttons to function as a stick, sacrificing actions. Neither is particularly good, but Gamestyle persevered with the first option. This became natural in time, but suffered immensely whenever quicker sequences were encountered (such as running around corners).

Within seconds of playing, it becomes clear that no-one thought to test the game on an actual PSP in actual real lighting conditions in the actual real world. Moody lighting and shadowy nooks are all well and good on a TV in a dark room, burning images onto your retinas, but on the PSP in anything approaching daylight, you're more likely to see just a reflection of your own mug staring back at you and not the dimly-lit room Sam is supposedly in. Assuming you're playing a mission where you're given the night-vision goggles, you'll be switching them on permanently - which bathes the otherwise decent graphics in a green monotone (you might as well just play something on the original Game Boy).

The entire game is set during the night, it seems. Starting in jungles, and working through oil rigs, a Manhattan blackout and even a prison, there's a fair degree of variety within the gloom. If you're unaware of how it works, a visibility meter gives you an idea of how hidden you are, while a noise meter displays how much sound you're making. Stay in dark areas, and you won't be seen. Some levels necessitate non-violent evasion, which are restrictive; but most will allow you to kill, incapacitate and interrogate enemies as you see fit. The X button is context-sensitive, handling all interaction through a system of menus that appear when you're close to something (light switches, bodies, computers, empty cans, doors, etc.). It's not elegant, but it works.

In fairness to Essentials, it's had to work with a flawed template. Splinter Cell games are almost entirely linear, and their challenge comes from fine-tuning your responses to unexpected events by trying over and over again until you get it right, artificially hiking up the play time (Gamestyle's game clock barely passed 2 hours, for the dozen or so we actually played it). On more than one embarrassing occasion, Sam was killed by an opening door. Also, whilst the stealth works well enough, in direct combat, Sam has all the grace of a drunk three-legged donkey. Animations seem to not gel together properly and Sam will attempt to elbow enemies to death from a standing pose, usually getting himself killed in the process. It's sneak or die, basically.

It wouldn't be so bad if it didn't take so long to get going. A loading screen loads the loading screen which loads the level, then a third loading screen loads the checkpoint you were up to. You can save anywhere in the game, but it's so long-winded, you can spend more time in the menus than actually playing. Further cheapening the game are graphical glitches (you can frequently 'see through' whole parts of the level, and occasionally inside Sam's head) and poor sound balancing (voice-overs are harder to hear than footsteps and musical cues aren't always on cue).

But it gets better as it goes, as UbiSoft decided to make the first few levels the worst ones. Sneaking into a secured mansion in the middle of a blackout ensures plenty of excellent set-pieces: first, avoiding cameras, then disabling the guard watching the monitors, and dragging bodies into shadows to avoid setting off alarms. When you get it right, it all looks very slick and professional, and reminds us what we like about Splinter Cell.

Using gadgets is also very entertaining. The lock pick and computer hacking work like separate mini-games, and there's other stealthy spy stuff you can use too, such as optic cables for peering under doors and sticky cameras to see around corners or distract guards. Annoyingly, these things are rarely actually needed, as a quick sneak around, a thump on the head or a stealthy shot from the dark will do the same job much quicker. Enemies are typically blind, or superhuman, depending on their mood. Sometimes you can't be seen, even if you're right in front of them, or they'll forget they saw you and give up looking; other times, they'll know you're in another room because they heard your footsteps.

Wireless multiplayer goes as far as a two-player deathmatch mode, but Gamestyle was unable to test this feature, so it doesn't factor into our verdict. If you have a friend with the game, it might be worth trying out, but there's no co-operative play or anything like that, even though that would have made perfect sense for the AI-buddy level.

Messy, glitchy and rarely satisfying, Essentials in no way represents the 'essential' Splinter Cell experience; rather it regurgitates some of its least impressive moments and crams it into a format that doesn't do it justice. Only a couple of set-pieces truly stand out from the crowd and only the most dedicated fan will want to see this one to the end.

Rating: 4 / 10

Words by Daniel James