Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow: This lousy follow-up is deservedly forgotten by Ubisoft, but every bizarre thing about it added enough sickening 'charm' to get me to (regrettably) complete the thankfully-brief thing. It's somewhat hard to get a copy, but Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow proves that scarcity does not equal value. TL;DR at the end.
I say "hard to get a copy" but truly, if you'd like to play Pandora Tomorrow for yourself (which I do not recommend), some light Googling will have you downloading it in no time. What I mean is you cannot buy the game on Steam nor Ubisoft's own Uplay: the only 'legit' way to play Pandora Tomorrow is buying a disc and I'll bet you'd have a tough time finding a copy at Gamestop. Say you buy it, though, a copy of Pandora Tomorrow for PC or the Splinter Cell Classic Trilogy HD for PS3 off Amazon or something: you're still in for issues. After paying about $15 or $70 (respectively, at time of review), you will either need to apply your own patches to get the game running or see the not-so-HD textures that fans didn't appreciate in the PS3 version. Word on the 'net seems to be Ubisoft couldn't be bothered to fix graphical issues in the PC version (though there's gotta be more to it than that), so they've just seemingly pretended the game never happened and let some random guy on the internet fix their mess for them. There's a close-up of Lambert drinking from a mug with the Ubisoft logo in a cutscene. Disgusting.
But the game! Once you finally got everything going, is it worth it? Absolutely not. I see strange praise for this game online to this day and I'll simply never understand it. Apparently the big development focus this time around was improving the lighting and shadows, but I could barely tell. Nothing about the game looks too special, just servicable and maybe slightly better than the original, and in fact many areas that looked dark had my sensor telling me I was standing in a floodlight. This combined with hair-trigger guards and their near-instant "sound the alarm" reflexes just brews up painful tedium. They can somehow report you to HQ from the grave, too. Expect lots of save-scumming and prayers of patience to the quick-saving/loading gods, because brother? You'll need it. There's no score of any kind at the end of a level, and most let you trip three alarms before game over; but if you're like me, you'll see that 1/3 alarms on the garbage HUD and sigh before going back to painfully do it 'correctly' this time.
Pandora Tomorrow's story will wash over you and leave nearly no trace behind. You may as well be asleep at the wheel just as the writers, voice actors, and animators were, because you won't really know what's happening while it's happening. Is anything even happening? Well, some guy named Sadono is planning on smallpoxing America and only his daily dead man's switch-like phone calls are keeping the virus at bay. Third Echelon is running out of patience and Sadono is running out of anytime minutes, so Sam Fisher and his team have to dunk on 'dono before PANDORA TOMORROW. There's a train level that's kind of neat but can be completed in like 4 minutes, clearly shoved in there to get a return on the art team's budget, sort of like with Uncharted 3. The final cutscene and Sam's solution to a smallpox bomb is hilariously stupid and I could never spoil such a 'great' moment. There is zero replay value.
Tonally, this game feels feverish and directionless and not much like the previous nor future Splinter Cell games. There's a literal on-rail shooting gallery segment (a NEW breed of stealth). At one point Sam is urgently messaged and told to murder the unarmed woman in front of him and if you do so, you're never told why, but given a "Trust me, bro." This sort of bothers Sam, who brings it up again later, but is just told nothing again. It's weird, though, because Lambert is supposed to be a good friend of Sam's, you'd think he'd give him something, but Sam stops caring at this point. 'Trust the feds', yeah fucking right.
It plays like a Splinter Cell game, for the most part. Everything feels pretty flimsy this time around, I could trip up enemy scripts by walking into a room they were breaching from the other side and just leaving it quickly (from whence I came). They paused in place and didn't know what to do anymore, apparently. There were other issues, like alt-tabbing out meant you'd never be able to fullscreen the game again. I had a hard crash during a level's intro cutscene (these all look like old GI Joe commercials), and of course the autosave for the level is immediately after said cutscene, making me repeat the end of the previous level. Sadono killed me once and, during the subsequent game over screen, he grabbed for a radio that wasn't there and said "Radio Sadono, he'll wanna hear about this." I know the timelines don't match up, but if you had told me this was an eight-year-old mobile game ported to PC, I'd believe you.
Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow is not a good game. The stealth and mechanics surrounding it are flimsy, many times Sam is required to shoot his way out of a situation - yet, like the first game, shooting more than one bullet is sort of a nightmare - and the plot is dull and hardly there. I don't see how anything about this game could captivate you other than wondering the eternal question, "How the hell did this get made?" Trust me when I say no one needs to bother finding out. Let Pandora Tomorrow stay forgotten, we're all better for it.
TL;DR: If you want a good stealth game, it's barely here, and if you want a fun shooter, it certainly isn't here. Pandora Tomorrow is unsure of what it wanted to be, but one thing's for certain: it's best left forgotten and unplayed. Never played it and are still curious? Just play Chaos Theory again, trust me.
I say "hard to get a copy" but truly, if you'd like to play Pandora Tomorrow for yourself (which I do not recommend), some light Googling will have you downloading it in no time. What I mean is you cannot buy the game on Steam nor Ubisoft's own Uplay: the only 'legit' way to play Pandora Tomorrow is buying a disc and I'll bet you'd have a tough time finding a copy at Gamestop. Say you buy it, though, a copy of Pandora Tomorrow for PC or the Splinter Cell Classic Trilogy HD for PS3 off Amazon or something: you're still in for issues. After paying about $15 or $70 (respectively, at time of review), you will either need to apply your own patches to get the game running or see the not-so-HD textures that fans didn't appreciate in the PS3 version. Word on the 'net seems to be Ubisoft couldn't be bothered to fix graphical issues in the PC version (though there's gotta be more to it than that), so they've just seemingly pretended the game never happened and let some random guy on the internet fix their mess for them. There's a close-up of Lambert drinking from a mug with the Ubisoft logo in a cutscene. Disgusting.
But the game! Once you finally got everything going, is it worth it? Absolutely not. I see strange praise for this game online to this day and I'll simply never understand it. Apparently the big development focus this time around was improving the lighting and shadows, but I could barely tell. Nothing about the game looks too special, just servicable and maybe slightly better than the original, and in fact many areas that looked dark had my sensor telling me I was standing in a floodlight. This combined with hair-trigger guards and their near-instant "sound the alarm" reflexes just brews up painful tedium. They can somehow report you to HQ from the grave, too. Expect lots of save-scumming and prayers of patience to the quick-saving/loading gods, because brother? You'll need it. There's no score of any kind at the end of a level, and most let you trip three alarms before game over; but if you're like me, you'll see that 1/3 alarms on the garbage HUD and sigh before going back to painfully do it 'correctly' this time.
Pandora Tomorrow's story will wash over you and leave nearly no trace behind. You may as well be asleep at the wheel just as the writers, voice actors, and animators were, because you won't really know what's happening while it's happening. Is anything even happening? Well, some guy named Sadono is planning on smallpoxing America and only his daily dead man's switch-like phone calls are keeping the virus at bay. Third Echelon is running out of patience and Sadono is running out of anytime minutes, so Sam Fisher and his team have to dunk on 'dono before PANDORA TOMORROW. There's a train level that's kind of neat but can be completed in like 4 minutes, clearly shoved in there to get a return on the art team's budget, sort of like with Uncharted 3. The final cutscene and Sam's solution to a smallpox bomb is hilariously stupid and I could never spoil such a 'great' moment. There is zero replay value.
Tonally, this game feels feverish and directionless and not much like the previous nor future Splinter Cell games. There's a literal on-rail shooting gallery segment (a NEW breed of stealth). At one point Sam is urgently messaged and told to murder the unarmed woman in front of him and if you do so, you're never told why, but given a "Trust me, bro." This sort of bothers Sam, who brings it up again later, but is just told nothing again. It's weird, though, because Lambert is supposed to be a good friend of Sam's, you'd think he'd give him something, but Sam stops caring at this point. 'Trust the feds', yeah fucking right.
It plays like a Splinter Cell game, for the most part. Everything feels pretty flimsy this time around, I could trip up enemy scripts by walking into a room they were breaching from the other side and just leaving it quickly (from whence I came). They paused in place and didn't know what to do anymore, apparently. There were other issues, like alt-tabbing out meant you'd never be able to fullscreen the game again. I had a hard crash during a level's intro cutscene (these all look like old GI Joe commercials), and of course the autosave for the level is immediately after said cutscene, making me repeat the end of the previous level. Sadono killed me once and, during the subsequent game over screen, he grabbed for a radio that wasn't there and said "Radio Sadono, he'll wanna hear about this." I know the timelines don't match up, but if you had told me this was an eight-year-old mobile game ported to PC, I'd believe you.
Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow is not a good game. The stealth and mechanics surrounding it are flimsy, many times Sam is required to shoot his way out of a situation - yet, like the first game, shooting more than one bullet is sort of a nightmare - and the plot is dull and hardly there. I don't see how anything about this game could captivate you other than wondering the eternal question, "How the hell did this get made?" Trust me when I say no one needs to bother finding out. Let Pandora Tomorrow stay forgotten, we're all better for it.
TL;DR: If you want a good stealth game, it's barely here, and if you want a fun shooter, it certainly isn't here. Pandora Tomorrow is unsure of what it wanted to be, but one thing's for certain: it's best left forgotten and unplayed. Never played it and are still curious? Just play Chaos Theory again, trust me.