Game review: ‘Splinter Cell: Blacklist’

One of the ways in which you can tell that a fictional character has become iconic is when they mysteriously cease to age. Batman, Superman and James Bond have been in service for more than 40 years now, and aged decrepitude is something they’ll never experience.

When the actors who play them become long in the tooth, they’re simply shuffled out of the way to make room for the next generation of talent. Eventually it becomes the case that while iconic characters may enjoy adventures that span the next 20 years, they will be remain forever young or at least on hold at the onset of middle age.

Sam Fisher, the hard-bitten secret agent of Ubisoft’s Splinter Cell series has just joined their ranks. In every entry in this stealth series, the gravel-throated Michael Ironside provided Fisher’s voice. This all changed with the announcement of Splinter Cell: Blacklist; Ubisoft announced it wanted a performance that combined both voice-work and full-body motion capture. Since a lot of Fisher’s daily routine involves dead-lifting himself up sheer wall faces and swift, brutal hand-to-hand combat, Ubisoft felt that the mantle of Fisher needed to be passed on.

Getting into character

On the surface, Eric Johnson doesn’t seem like a natural fit for Sam Fisher. The Canadian actor, who has appeared in TV series such as Smallville and Criminal Minds, is a charismatic, jovial bloke with a boomerang-grin smile. To be frank, it’s hard to reconcile him with the scowling lifesize cutouts of Fisher that were dotted around Ubsoft Toronto’s studio. But the game’s director, David Footman, says that the process of casting Johnson was almost dictated by the assets of Sam that the publisher had created over the six or so games in the series.

“What we found with facial animation is that the closer the geometry is to the model that we have, the better a reflection we get from the facial animation,” says Footman. “So when we’re not doing pure likeness, we often make modifications to the character and modifications who we choose to play the character.”

“If we can find someone who fits more one-on-one it reduces the amount of time we spend on polish later,” he says. “When I was sent Eric’s picture it was almost a little too good to be true. I looked at it and though ‘Wow, that’s great geometry.’”

As something of a fan of the series of games he was about to appear in, Johnson was also very aware of the daunting task ahead of him. Johnson knew he was following a tough act in Michael Ironside, who for many of the Splinter Cell faithful is Sam Fisher in a similar way as to how David Hayter is Solid Snake in the minds of Metal Gear Solid fans. To hear Johnson tell it, Fisher was a challenge the actor had to come to grips with as early as possible.

“The character of Sam Fisher is a guy with a history, but he’s still just a character like James Bond is James Bond, but it the movie can feel a little different depending on who is playing him,” he says. “I knew if I threw myself into Sam as much as possible, that was the best thing I could do in order to pay respects to the fans, the franchise, to Michael Ironside and the game I was starring in.”

Fisher is ridiculously agile in Blacklist able to shimmy a ledge the length of a block in seconds and the level design is less about stealth than it is about using Sam as a spring-loaded deathtrap. Players will easily progress if they mostly avoid confrontation, but if they’re faced with one or two opponents they can use Conviction’s “Mark Kill” mechanic to get out of trouble. They can also deploy Fisher’s hand-to-hand combat abilities, which is where the new “physicality” of Johnson’s performance comes in.

On screen, this translates to a Sam Fisher who is able to sneak, duck and conceal himself in shadows. But there’s also an emphasis also on his fluidity of movement snapping in and out of cover and sliding across surfaces and his ability to dispatch foes, lethally and non-lethally, at close quarters.

Multiplayer: intuitive action

The co-op multiplayer is divided between two characters: Briggs, a CIA black ops soldier and new recruit to Sam’s team, Fourth Echelon, and Grimm, the agent fans will remember from earlier entries in the series. Briggs’s missions are check-pointed action-orientated affairs into which “Ghost”, “Panther” and “Assault” styles of play feel plugged into the action. Grimm’s missions are more tightly focused; they’re old-school Splinter Cell affairs in which the player is dropped into a map, given a couple of objectives and allowed to go about their business in any way they see fit. The catch here, though, is that there are no checkpoints and being spotted causes an instant fail. It’s possible that friends will fall out over Grimm’s set of missions.

Both online modes complement the game’s main campaign, and can be accessed at any time from Blacklist’s centralised hub, which appears as the interior of Fourth Echelon’s flying HQ.

Guardian News and Media 2013