It's a fine last hurrah to the franchise.
Gameplay is great and voice acting (while at first I didn't like the Sam voice change it grew on me but it'll never surpass Michael Ironside).
Level wise it's insanely great and varied.
Story has a few weird things going but it's minor stuff.
Cast wise everyone is great, Kobin is just eating every scene and to think I used to hate the guy back in Conviction for being a little bitch.
Grim roasting people left and right as she should cuz she a girlboss.
Charlie and Briggs are fine. And Sam is still just the Sam we all know and love.

Following the events of Conviction, Third Echelon has been disbanded, but the brand new Fourth Echelon has risen up in its place, lead by Sam Fisher himself. He's not exactly used to giving orders, but he'd better learn, because a terrorist organization known as "The Blacklist" looms over the world. Their demands? They want every country to withdraw all of their troops to their home countries, and if they don't, they'll commit increasingly drastic acts of terrorism on American soil each week. Anna Grimsdottir returns on intel duty. Newcomer Charlie handles the team's technology and hacking needs. Briggs is the newer, less experienced (but still invaluable) field agent. In between missions, you hang out on the Paladin, a flying base of operations where you can upgrade gear/facilities, chat with your teammates, and my personal favorite feature, call your daughter! Now that we know Sarah's alive and safe, Sam makes damn sure to catch up on lost time with her, even if they're worlds apart due to his occupation. He's an NSA spy and a family guy. Big problem that goes against quite a bit of what's been developed: Sam's got a new voice actor, and he sounds younger. If you've followed the series all this way, you probably know what I'm getting at, but in case you don't...

Sam Fisher is old.

He was already pulling off some spry techniques for a 50-year old in Conviction, but now I'm just convinced that he's aging in reverse. Eventually I kinda just put his age out of my mind and treated his character as if it was a soft reboot, but the facade still breaks from time to time. Sam is also often surprisingly abrasive towards his teammates, usually taking out his own mistakes on them verbally. He rarely cracks any jokes, and is generally unlikeable.

Gameplay is like Conviction before it, with an emphasis on speed and dodging between sources of cover. Blacklist makes a concentrated effort to be better though: Stealth mechanics are BACK, and they're more viable than ever. The path of least resistance is often the one where you outright avoid enemies. Your non-lethal weapon of choice is a stun gun with extremely limited ammo, so it needs to be used sparingly. Being stealthy is a joy on its own, but the game introduces a scoring system that doles out points depending on your playstyle. "Ghost" points are for pure, non-lethal sneaking, "Panther" points are for comitting murder without getting caught, and "Assault" points are for getting into loud gunfights. You can earn mastery status for each of these three playstyles on every mission if you score high enough. It feels surprisingly good to ghost through a segment of level and see a massive point bonus pop up at the bottom of the screen for all the enemies you just dodged.

Level structure is fairly linear, but I feel like it works in service of the points system in place. A full mission will only take 45-60 minutes to complete, and afterwards your score is turned into funds you can spend on better equipment. This is supplemented by completely optional missions you can take on, each providing a pretty big payout. Grim's optional missions stand out above the rest though: three stages of perfect stealth. There are no checkpoints, failure means starting the whole mission over. This is probably the hardest content in the game, but as a result, it was also my favorite part.

For Ubisoft's last stab at Splinter Cell, it's actually pretty great. That's a definitive "last" in my book, by the way. The Splinter Cell VR project fell through, and with how management at Ubisoft is looking lately, I can't say I have hope for that Splinter Cell remaster they announced a while back. In all brutal honesty, it's probably cancelled as well. I see this as a blessing, though. Sam's had a long and fruitful career, and if he so wishes, now he can end it on a high note and retire in peace.

This was a bit too late to fit in with the last wave of quintessential dumb and disinterested games. The entire story is military blah blah and informs its mostly uninteresting scenes. It really comes down to its gameplay, which does work well, but also contains big question marks about modern stealth gameplay.

The urge of offering the player multiple gameplay styles results in the rather obvious distinction between stealth and 'kill everything as loudly as possible because that's why you play Splinter Cell I guess'. While the levels start out well, they get worse with fewer opportunities to flank while dumping more and more enemies on you. What I do appreciate is the one break in its narrative structure, transforming a previously safe location. But in the meantime, you could play any other stealth game.

It's Splinter Cell Conviction 2 with stealth elements built on a action game, the stealth doesn't actually work, every area is completely lit, there's no cover, no roaming enemies, nothing, the game at no moment feels like it wants the player to do anything but to use the cover to cover dash and abuse the mark and execute mechanic, you don't feel rewarded at all for trying stealth or trying to avoid killing, it simply does not work at all.

To complete the Ubisoft package of trying to make every game have the same mechanics, Blacklist has a huge loadout page that feels completely unnecessary with everything being customizable to even Sam's gloves, with stats that barely if at all alter any gameplay and ending up just wasted effort, speaking of which, every outfit looks TERRIBLE, the visual artists had a stroke or something while making this game.

To top off the "no soul" meme, they changed both Sam and Grim's voice actors, while Ironside is rumored to've been too sick at the time to work on the game, there's no real reason to change Grim voice when this game is a direct sequel. I really have no hope for what Ubisoft does in the future with this franchise, they really had no clue what worked and what did not.

"My life is as stable as the Backloggd servers"
- Enterprise

One of Ubisoft's best games.

7/10

I really liked the first three mainline Splinter Cell games (plus the original Xbox version of Double Agent) and had fun with Conviction for what it was, but this one never clicked with me. Merging the playstyles of Chaos Theory (referred to here as "Ghost") and Conviction (dubbed "Panther") sounded awesome on paper, but trying to stealth through levels non-lethally made it feel like I was continuously fighting with the mechanics. The rail shooting and FPS sections felt tacked on, and the storytelling and characterization (even by Tom Clancy video game standards) ranged from boring to obnoxious.

The funny thing is that I did enjoy Grímsdóttir's stealth-focused side-missions. If the whole game had been like the Billionaire's Yacht DLC level, I probably would regard it as highly as most people do.

The way Ubisoft has treated this series over the years has made be never want another Splinter Cell game to be made again as much as I love the franchise (mainly the first game and Chaos Theory). You can guarantee they'd make an open world like MGSV but with the usual Ubisoft formula cancer.

For the past few releases they turned the game from a stealth shooter to a horrible cover shooter. This game is an attempt to make a bit of a hybrid while trying to get that old Splinter Cell feeling back. It does not work. The missions and stealth design in those missions are worse than the 2002 game.

Over 10 years and in the end they've regressed. It's a sad end to what could've been a fantastic stealth franchise, but I very much doubt that they'll ever be able to capture the feeling of games like Chaos Theory, especially the state Ubisoft is in right now.

Man, this game is just cool you know. The sleek presentation, the cool spy-thriller story, it's all just nice to play.

I actually went to this one straight from Chaos Theory, skipping Double Agent and Conviction (both have less-than-ideal PC ports). The lighting thing being binary rather than having a meter like before is such an unneeded change, and so is the removal of the sound meter.

And Sam's voice, oof. Like, I get it: Ironside was treating cancer at the time and that fucking sucks. But then... why still do it with Sam Fisher? He not only sounds different, he acts and looks different too. He's kind of an asshole in this one, and with every passing game he somehow gets younger, huh. For crying out loud, just use a different character and say that Sam is fishing somewhere. A lot of the fanbase dismissed this game because of that, and that could've been easily avoided.

And this game is sometimes guilty of modern AAA trappings, like "immersive gameplay" (sections where all you do is walk forward and could've easily been a cutscene...). But credit where credit is due, this game handles the action setpieces quite well. They're not too frequent to be annoying or pace-breaking, and end up feeling electric and exciting, and plenty of them still have room for a stealthy approach.