Oh, Sam, what have they done to you?
A friend of mine likes to argue that the seventh generation of video games was the worst of the lot. It’s been the source of a few debates about what came out when for what systems and how bad they were relative to any other generation, but he’s remained adamant that there is nothing, nothing at all worse than the games that were coming out while the Xbox 360 and PS3 were the most modern consoles. He’s a bit older than me, so these were games that I grew up with. I didn’t really get the chance to play most “old” stuff (read: PS2 and back) aside from what I could nab at garage sales and off of the Playstation Network, so I didn’t really have an idea of what games looked like before the seventh gen. It’s only been a fairly recent development that I’ve gotten harder into emulation and broadened my horizons beyond whatever I could pick up for sixty bucks at a Walmart.
The more games I play, the more I’m convinced that my friend is right.
The seventh generation had an obsession with “streamlining”. There was this conception that gamers wanted titles that were completely homogeneous and interchangeable. Call of Duty made money, so make your games more like Call of Duty. Rez didn’t make money, so make your games less like Rez. It was whatever the opposite of a renaissance was; the advent of stricter, hyper-focused market testing was incentivizing the abandonment of the niche title in pursuit of casting as wide a net as possible. Why try to make some money when you could make all of the money? The bottom was falling out of the AA market, and games needed to be bigger, more inflated, more hungry for your time and money. This reached its natural conclusion in the next generation with the creation of loot boxes and season passes, but the seeds of actively anti-consumer practice were starting to be scattered here. God, remember online passes? Second-hand games didn’t make enough money, so companies needed to wring an extra five bucks out of whatever poor sap didn’t bother buying new if they wanted to play multiplayer.
Anyway, one of the genres that got hit hard was the western-developed stealth game. Stealth titles were just too slow, too boring, too methodical. General audiences wouldn’t want to spend all of their time playing them when the new Black Ops map pack just dropped. So Hitman got Absolution, a title that basically forgot that it was originally an environmental puzzle game in favor of being a third-person shooter with “stealth elements”; Thief got THI4F, a game as bad as the title would imply; new games like Dishonored and The Last of Us were content to leave stealth as an optional little bonus to thin out a crowd before you went in guns blazing.
And Splinter Cell got Conviction, a game that watched The Bourne Identity too many times and decided that Sam Fisher really belonged in a commando sweater.
Where to even begin, with a mess this big? I feel like I’m looking into a condemned house and trying to figure out if I should start cleaning it by stripping out the carpets or scrubbing the mold off the walls. I suppose I can give the game a compliment before I start ripping into it: the sound design is pretty good. The directional audio worked consistently well, which is more than I can say for most games. It was easy to tell where an enemy was without seeing him so long as he was shouting some weird combat bark, which they did pretty frequently. Everything they wind up saying was goofy enough to get a laugh. It reminds me of the Ghost Tour bit in I Think You Should Leave. “Fuck, it’s fucking Fisher! How the fuck are we gonna kill this fucking guy?! Fuck!” Calm down! Like half of everyone’s dialog is just cursing. It’s silly. Honestly, it might be the only part of the game that I enjoyed.
Every part of the gameplay exists seemingly as a solution so in search of a problem that it needed to start inventing them. New to the series — and remaining a mainstay as much as you can call it one, since only one Splinter Cell game actually came out after this — is the Mark and Execute system, wherein you can tag a couple of enemies and then kill them all at once with the press of a button. You might be thinking to yourself that “tagging” enemies in a shooter to kill them later is a bit pointless; after all, if you have line of sight for long enough to hover your reticle over them and press Q to mark them, then surely you can just press left click and shoot them without needing to take the extra step. You would be right.
Well, you would be, but Sam Fisher has forgotten how to hit a target more than ten yards out in his old age.
The engagement range of all of your weapons has absolutely plummeted since the time of previous games. If Sam is crouched down, in cover, standing completely still, and holding his aim at a guy about thirty feet out, he’s probably going to miss. He’s going to miss a lot. Reticle bloom is absolutely massive, which really matters when the act of landing an instakill head shot is up to luck more than it is to skill; if the random distribution gods decide that your first bullet is going wide, then the rest of the magazine is going to follow behind it. By the time the enemies get helmets which render them completely immune to anything less than eight rounds in center mass, you have to give up on any pretense of stealth and just commit to playing a sluggish, boring cover shooter. It’s rough. The Mark and Execute system is still bordering on pointless in spite of this, since it requires a melee kill before it recharges. You can practically feel the game begging you to use it when they spawn an enemy with his back to the door, which then leads into a room with four guys standing around in a circle discussing how much they wish Sam Fisher won’t walk in and shoot them all in the head.
Not helping matters is the fact that your foes are dumb. They’re really dumb. The game informs you with a little ghostly afterimage of Sam where your last known position was, and enemies seem to just wander up to it in the hopes of catching you off guard. All you need to do to counter this is shimmy yourself a few feet in either direction and they won’t bother checking around to see if you’ve moved, nor will they organize a flank in anticipation of you doing so; you can just watch five guys sprint in a straight line down a choke point where you’ve planted a beeping, glowing landmine, and let it immediately clear the entire room of every threat before anyone's fired a shot.
It should go without saying that the story is dreck, but that won't stop me from pontificating about it anyway. What we have here is a cross between The Bourne Identity and Taken; a sad dad who is the greatest and most legendary super soldier to ever live mowing down as many people as he can while a shaky handheld camera follows behind him in his quest to get his daughter back. It doesn't even have the confidence that Kane and Lynch had of actually incorporating the shaky-cam into the gameplay to make the entire experience feel like found footage. Here, it's just reserved for cutscenes. We need to wiggle the frame all around while Michael Ironside grumbles about how he wants his daughter back and how pissed off he is. Because as we all know, when you think of Sam Fisher, you think of an angry dad. Oh, you don't? Huh. Well, you should have told that to Richard Dansky, who took over for the franchise starting with Double Agent and decided that that was going to be Fisher's character from here on out.
It's so stupid. The narrative really has zero respect for the player's intelligence, and I can prove it with the simple statement that the game keeps plastering keywords all over the environment so that you always know how someone is feeling. Grim (who is now a sexy spy babe whose tits cannot stop shaking whenever she's on screen) is revealing to Sam that she's been lying to him for three straight years about his daughter's death? Plaster the words ANGER, LIES, SARAH over the screen to make sure that we're keeping up. If you say that Max Payne 3 did this, I'll argue that it was at least trying to maintain the feel of the comic panels from the first two games. This is much more akin to DmC: Devil May Cry's level geometry being painted with the words "BITCH IS NEAR" when Kat is in the next room over. You even get a literal Press X to Hit Woman prompt three times in a row before launching your escape in the very first mission for the tacticool bro points. Equal rights, equal fights. Oorah.
The bad guys are running Third Echelon now (but they were the NSA before, so I repeat myself) with the help of/under the guise of being some mercenary group called Black Arrow. They're funded by some mystery benefactor called Meggido, and they've been developing EMPs to blow up all of the electronics in DC in order to take over the White House. This, as the plan goes, will then allow Third Echelon to not be defunded, so that they can continue putting a stop to terrorist attacks. Third Echelon is committing acts of terror in an attempt to demonstrate that the US needs Third Echelon to stop people from committing acts of terror. It isn't even a good false flag; Sam Fisher figures out the entire scheme because the two mustache-twirling villains have a meeting in broad daylight to discuss their evil plans, and Sam manages to capture the entire thing with nothing more than two hidden cameras that were already there by the time he showed up. The president is the one to tip Sam off that there's going to be a coup with the express goal of killing her to create a power vacuum, and she doesn't even leave the fucking White House on the night that everything is set to go down. If this sounds borderline incomprehensible, it makes even less sense while you're playing it. This is me recounting what happened after I've had a day to think about it and a Wikipedia plot synopsis to leaf through.
This is also a contender for one of the worst soundtracks I've heard in a game. Not only is it completely sonically inconsistent, but some of these songs are complete fucking garbage. Who's in the mood for some dead daughter electronic? No? How about some generic buttrock that sounds like it was pulled directly from a royalty-free library and dropped into the game without a single edit? Still no? Well, don't worry. We've got an inexplicable instrumental version of Building Steam With A Grain of Salt, and it fits about as well into the segment in which it plays as a round peg in a square hole. God forgive whatever Ubisoft employee who decided that this game needed to play a track from Endtroducing... in a sequence with infinite Mark and Execute that's more boring than it is badass. What an abject waste of a pull from one of the greatest albums ever produced.
Splinter Cell: Conviction is trash, but it's really nothing more than a collection of symptoms of the greater problem that games at the time were facing. It wasn't enough for this to just be a game. It needed to be a big, important game. It needed to rip off movie plots and hire Hollywood composers. It needed to have flashy graphics and new gameplay mechanics and appeal to as broad of an audience as possible in the hopes of maximizing the final profits. This has — thankfully — died down in recent years, and games like Hitman have come back in a big way with the realization that appealing to a niche isn't a death knell for your product. But I/O Interactive is a much smaller collective than Ubisoft and its many tendrils. It's been a decade since the last Splinter Cell game, and I struggle to imagine Ubisoft willing to settle for anything less than all of the money with their new games. Maybe if they can figure out a way to work live service into it.
They sent Sam Fisher to Iraq in this.
A friend of mine likes to argue that the seventh generation of video games was the worst of the lot. It’s been the source of a few debates about what came out when for what systems and how bad they were relative to any other generation, but he’s remained adamant that there is nothing, nothing at all worse than the games that were coming out while the Xbox 360 and PS3 were the most modern consoles. He’s a bit older than me, so these were games that I grew up with. I didn’t really get the chance to play most “old” stuff (read: PS2 and back) aside from what I could nab at garage sales and off of the Playstation Network, so I didn’t really have an idea of what games looked like before the seventh gen. It’s only been a fairly recent development that I’ve gotten harder into emulation and broadened my horizons beyond whatever I could pick up for sixty bucks at a Walmart.
The more games I play, the more I’m convinced that my friend is right.
The seventh generation had an obsession with “streamlining”. There was this conception that gamers wanted titles that were completely homogeneous and interchangeable. Call of Duty made money, so make your games more like Call of Duty. Rez didn’t make money, so make your games less like Rez. It was whatever the opposite of a renaissance was; the advent of stricter, hyper-focused market testing was incentivizing the abandonment of the niche title in pursuit of casting as wide a net as possible. Why try to make some money when you could make all of the money? The bottom was falling out of the AA market, and games needed to be bigger, more inflated, more hungry for your time and money. This reached its natural conclusion in the next generation with the creation of loot boxes and season passes, but the seeds of actively anti-consumer practice were starting to be scattered here. God, remember online passes? Second-hand games didn’t make enough money, so companies needed to wring an extra five bucks out of whatever poor sap didn’t bother buying new if they wanted to play multiplayer.
Anyway, one of the genres that got hit hard was the western-developed stealth game. Stealth titles were just too slow, too boring, too methodical. General audiences wouldn’t want to spend all of their time playing them when the new Black Ops map pack just dropped. So Hitman got Absolution, a title that basically forgot that it was originally an environmental puzzle game in favor of being a third-person shooter with “stealth elements”; Thief got THI4F, a game as bad as the title would imply; new games like Dishonored and The Last of Us were content to leave stealth as an optional little bonus to thin out a crowd before you went in guns blazing.
And Splinter Cell got Conviction, a game that watched The Bourne Identity too many times and decided that Sam Fisher really belonged in a commando sweater.
Where to even begin, with a mess this big? I feel like I’m looking into a condemned house and trying to figure out if I should start cleaning it by stripping out the carpets or scrubbing the mold off the walls. I suppose I can give the game a compliment before I start ripping into it: the sound design is pretty good. The directional audio worked consistently well, which is more than I can say for most games. It was easy to tell where an enemy was without seeing him so long as he was shouting some weird combat bark, which they did pretty frequently. Everything they wind up saying was goofy enough to get a laugh. It reminds me of the Ghost Tour bit in I Think You Should Leave. “Fuck, it’s fucking Fisher! How the fuck are we gonna kill this fucking guy?! Fuck!” Calm down! Like half of everyone’s dialog is just cursing. It’s silly. Honestly, it might be the only part of the game that I enjoyed.
Every part of the gameplay exists seemingly as a solution so in search of a problem that it needed to start inventing them. New to the series — and remaining a mainstay as much as you can call it one, since only one Splinter Cell game actually came out after this — is the Mark and Execute system, wherein you can tag a couple of enemies and then kill them all at once with the press of a button. You might be thinking to yourself that “tagging” enemies in a shooter to kill them later is a bit pointless; after all, if you have line of sight for long enough to hover your reticle over them and press Q to mark them, then surely you can just press left click and shoot them without needing to take the extra step. You would be right.
Well, you would be, but Sam Fisher has forgotten how to hit a target more than ten yards out in his old age.
The engagement range of all of your weapons has absolutely plummeted since the time of previous games. If Sam is crouched down, in cover, standing completely still, and holding his aim at a guy about thirty feet out, he’s probably going to miss. He’s going to miss a lot. Reticle bloom is absolutely massive, which really matters when the act of landing an instakill head shot is up to luck more than it is to skill; if the random distribution gods decide that your first bullet is going wide, then the rest of the magazine is going to follow behind it. By the time the enemies get helmets which render them completely immune to anything less than eight rounds in center mass, you have to give up on any pretense of stealth and just commit to playing a sluggish, boring cover shooter. It’s rough. The Mark and Execute system is still bordering on pointless in spite of this, since it requires a melee kill before it recharges. You can practically feel the game begging you to use it when they spawn an enemy with his back to the door, which then leads into a room with four guys standing around in a circle discussing how much they wish Sam Fisher won’t walk in and shoot them all in the head.
Not helping matters is the fact that your foes are dumb. They’re really dumb. The game informs you with a little ghostly afterimage of Sam where your last known position was, and enemies seem to just wander up to it in the hopes of catching you off guard. All you need to do to counter this is shimmy yourself a few feet in either direction and they won’t bother checking around to see if you’ve moved, nor will they organize a flank in anticipation of you doing so; you can just watch five guys sprint in a straight line down a choke point where you’ve planted a beeping, glowing landmine, and let it immediately clear the entire room of every threat before anyone's fired a shot.
It should go without saying that the story is dreck, but that won't stop me from pontificating about it anyway. What we have here is a cross between The Bourne Identity and Taken; a sad dad who is the greatest and most legendary super soldier to ever live mowing down as many people as he can while a shaky handheld camera follows behind him in his quest to get his daughter back. It doesn't even have the confidence that Kane and Lynch had of actually incorporating the shaky-cam into the gameplay to make the entire experience feel like found footage. Here, it's just reserved for cutscenes. We need to wiggle the frame all around while Michael Ironside grumbles about how he wants his daughter back and how pissed off he is. Because as we all know, when you think of Sam Fisher, you think of an angry dad. Oh, you don't? Huh. Well, you should have told that to Richard Dansky, who took over for the franchise starting with Double Agent and decided that that was going to be Fisher's character from here on out.
It's so stupid. The narrative really has zero respect for the player's intelligence, and I can prove it with the simple statement that the game keeps plastering keywords all over the environment so that you always know how someone is feeling. Grim (who is now a sexy spy babe whose tits cannot stop shaking whenever she's on screen) is revealing to Sam that she's been lying to him for three straight years about his daughter's death? Plaster the words ANGER, LIES, SARAH over the screen to make sure that we're keeping up. If you say that Max Payne 3 did this, I'll argue that it was at least trying to maintain the feel of the comic panels from the first two games. This is much more akin to DmC: Devil May Cry's level geometry being painted with the words "BITCH IS NEAR" when Kat is in the next room over. You even get a literal Press X to Hit Woman prompt three times in a row before launching your escape in the very first mission for the tacticool bro points. Equal rights, equal fights. Oorah.
The bad guys are running Third Echelon now (but they were the NSA before, so I repeat myself) with the help of/under the guise of being some mercenary group called Black Arrow. They're funded by some mystery benefactor called Meggido, and they've been developing EMPs to blow up all of the electronics in DC in order to take over the White House. This, as the plan goes, will then allow Third Echelon to not be defunded, so that they can continue putting a stop to terrorist attacks. Third Echelon is committing acts of terror in an attempt to demonstrate that the US needs Third Echelon to stop people from committing acts of terror. It isn't even a good false flag; Sam Fisher figures out the entire scheme because the two mustache-twirling villains have a meeting in broad daylight to discuss their evil plans, and Sam manages to capture the entire thing with nothing more than two hidden cameras that were already there by the time he showed up. The president is the one to tip Sam off that there's going to be a coup with the express goal of killing her to create a power vacuum, and she doesn't even leave the fucking White House on the night that everything is set to go down. If this sounds borderline incomprehensible, it makes even less sense while you're playing it. This is me recounting what happened after I've had a day to think about it and a Wikipedia plot synopsis to leaf through.
This is also a contender for one of the worst soundtracks I've heard in a game. Not only is it completely sonically inconsistent, but some of these songs are complete fucking garbage. Who's in the mood for some dead daughter electronic? No? How about some generic buttrock that sounds like it was pulled directly from a royalty-free library and dropped into the game without a single edit? Still no? Well, don't worry. We've got an inexplicable instrumental version of Building Steam With A Grain of Salt, and it fits about as well into the segment in which it plays as a round peg in a square hole. God forgive whatever Ubisoft employee who decided that this game needed to play a track from Endtroducing... in a sequence with infinite Mark and Execute that's more boring than it is badass. What an abject waste of a pull from one of the greatest albums ever produced.
Splinter Cell: Conviction is trash, but it's really nothing more than a collection of symptoms of the greater problem that games at the time were facing. It wasn't enough for this to just be a game. It needed to be a big, important game. It needed to rip off movie plots and hire Hollywood composers. It needed to have flashy graphics and new gameplay mechanics and appeal to as broad of an audience as possible in the hopes of maximizing the final profits. This has — thankfully — died down in recent years, and games like Hitman have come back in a big way with the realization that appealing to a niche isn't a death knell for your product. But I/O Interactive is a much smaller collective than Ubisoft and its many tendrils. It's been a decade since the last Splinter Cell game, and I struggle to imagine Ubisoft willing to settle for anything less than all of the money with their new games. Maybe if they can figure out a way to work live service into it.
They sent Sam Fisher to Iraq in this.
Reviewed on May 02, 2023
jobosno
11 months ago