Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Essentials is an action-adventure video game with heavy emphasis on stealth. It is part of the Splinter Cell series and was released for the PlayStation Portable handheld system. It was developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft on March 21, 2006 in North America. It is the fourth entry in the series and was powered by Unreal Engine 2.
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Atleast the game was very short. Because goddamn...
So firstly, the fact this game precedes Double Agent and manages to just spoil a shitload of important things from it is insane, but it's not like the stories really matter in these games to me personally, they're uninteresting and I'm really only here for the gameplay and levels.
So uh...How WAS the gameplay? Uhh......Hah...Uh yeah. So. This type of game just doesn't translate to PSP. Though it totally could've benefit from having a camera that can adjust automatically or follow you rather than having an obnoxious control scheme.
Combat in this game is worse than it was in any of the other games and that for some reason especially says a lot. There's a lot of downgrades compared to previous games so stealth is much less open and you can no longer handle a situation like you could in Chaos Theory.
Sure, argue all you want "It's a PSP game" and yes, while that is true, you could still easily bring specific gameplay systems and build original maps and an original and unique story on PSP. But this game has none of that.
So far, out of my Splinter Cell series replay; this and Pandora Tomorrow are the worst.
So firstly, the fact this game precedes Double Agent and manages to just spoil a shitload of important things from it is insane, but it's not like the stories really matter in these games to me personally, they're uninteresting and I'm really only here for the gameplay and levels.
So uh...How WAS the gameplay? Uhh......Hah...Uh yeah. So. This type of game just doesn't translate to PSP. Though it totally could've benefit from having a camera that can adjust automatically or follow you rather than having an obnoxious control scheme.
Combat in this game is worse than it was in any of the other games and that for some reason especially says a lot. There's a lot of downgrades compared to previous games so stealth is much less open and you can no longer handle a situation like you could in Chaos Theory.
Sure, argue all you want "It's a PSP game" and yes, while that is true, you could still easily bring specific gameplay systems and build original maps and an original and unique story on PSP. But this game has none of that.
So far, out of my Splinter Cell series replay; this and Pandora Tomorrow are the worst.
A baffling game from the word go: employing a flashback style of storytelling, it positioned itself as a "greatest hits" of the Splinter Cell games in existence up to 2006, only it doesn't even remotely feature the best levels from the franchise, and on top of that it manages to spoil the then-upcoming Double Agent by featuring missions set during and after the events of that game, including a major plot point which, in fariness, the trailers for SC:DA managed to thorougly spoil months in advance.
Aside from this confusing piecemeal approach to its story, what makes it a really bad game are the inherent limitations of the PSP hardware, chief above all the awful analog nub that makes it impossible to achieve a proper variable sneaking speed. As a result, each time you want to change your movement speed you have to come to a dead stop and tilt the stick again to the angle corresponding to the desired speed. It's awful.
If that weren't enough, the lack of a second analog stick means the camera is cintrolled by coming to a stop and using the nub to look around while holding a button. there is an alternate control method which uses the face buttons as camer control and an awkwardly placed button to toggle them back and forth beween that and their normal functions, but that doesn't help.
The only decent way to play this is to install a plugin mod on an emulated version, which fixes analog movenent as much as it could be fixed, making it at least playable, adds dual analog support for camera and smoother frame rate, but that doesn't cnage the fact that this is just an inferior way to play old levels you can better experience by pòaying the original games. Playing Chaos theory missions in this form is an affront to decency, and the few new levels that are there aren't that great, or original.
On top of all that, the game adds its own annoyances as well: want to punch an enemy from the front? You better be ready to get shot multiple times as he goes down, for random damage ranging from 5 to 80%. they even screwed up the knockout animations triggered from a grab hold: they inverted the lethal and non-lethal anomations, which will greatly confuse anyone familiar with the franchise. The first time you get a "mission failed" because you pit a civilian in a non-lethal sleeper hold and the game treats that as a kill move, you won't have any recourse other than wondring what on earth they were smoking while making this game.
Or, for that matter, what you'd need to smoke in order to choose to play it over any other game in the series.
Aside from this confusing piecemeal approach to its story, what makes it a really bad game are the inherent limitations of the PSP hardware, chief above all the awful analog nub that makes it impossible to achieve a proper variable sneaking speed. As a result, each time you want to change your movement speed you have to come to a dead stop and tilt the stick again to the angle corresponding to the desired speed. It's awful.
If that weren't enough, the lack of a second analog stick means the camera is cintrolled by coming to a stop and using the nub to look around while holding a button. there is an alternate control method which uses the face buttons as camer control and an awkwardly placed button to toggle them back and forth beween that and their normal functions, but that doesn't help.
The only decent way to play this is to install a plugin mod on an emulated version, which fixes analog movenent as much as it could be fixed, making it at least playable, adds dual analog support for camera and smoother frame rate, but that doesn't cnage the fact that this is just an inferior way to play old levels you can better experience by pòaying the original games. Playing Chaos theory missions in this form is an affront to decency, and the few new levels that are there aren't that great, or original.
On top of all that, the game adds its own annoyances as well: want to punch an enemy from the front? You better be ready to get shot multiple times as he goes down, for random damage ranging from 5 to 80%. they even screwed up the knockout animations triggered from a grab hold: they inverted the lethal and non-lethal anomations, which will greatly confuse anyone familiar with the franchise. The first time you get a "mission failed" because you pit a civilian in a non-lethal sleeper hold and the game treats that as a kill move, you won't have any recourse other than wondring what on earth they were smoking while making this game.
Or, for that matter, what you'd need to smoke in order to choose to play it over any other game in the series.
Technically, it’s borderline offensive, but it does manage to provide a pared down handheld Splinter Cell experience. The remixed levels are the worst, but I enjoyed it for the most part.
It's admirable that they crammed Splinter Cell's gameplay onto the PSP, but the level design in this is mostly linear. It also borrows levels from other Splinter Cell games, and manages to simplify them even further. Control scheme also has its quirks. You have to hold the circle button to move the camera, forcing the game flow to be stop-and-go. The PSP analog nub doesn't have nearly the same range of movement as an analog stick, making the distinction between slow/regular movement speeds extremely inconsistent. Just an extremely mixed bag overall.
Escaping from prison, you kill a guy who has an AK, and nearby on the table there's a knife. Take a guess, which one of these weapons the game lets you pick up and use.