Splinter Cell 3D.

I bought a 3DS the first week it came out in the UK and I loved it. I loved the idea of the 3D effect with out glasses (which I’m a bit bored of now to be honest). I loved the built in AR games but most of all I loved the Street Pass Feature, to which I still get excited when every I “meet” a new player with it. What I didn’t love though is when I went to my local games shop on release week to see what new 3D adventures awaited me. Which wasn’t many, out of the very limited chooses I had the only two games that I wanted to play were Street Fighter 3D and Splinter Cell 3D but as I didn’t really want to spend £40 on a button mashing fighting game of would of gotten bored of after 5min I went with Splinter Cell.

This is the first Splinter Cell game I have ever played so I didn’t realise (or care) until I looked it up that this is a remake of Splinter Cell Chaos Theory originally released in 2005 so if you played Chaos Theory feel free to skip the rest of this paragraph. The game is set mostly in East Asia where tensions are running high between Japan and both side of Korea. After a American warship is destroyed in a unprovoked attack in the region our hero Sam Fisher is sent in to find a computer hacker who could be involved he then uncovers a conspiracy plotting to start world war 3.

As you’d come to expect the gameplay is based around stealth which has its good points and bad points. I enjoy stealth games, I enjoy sneaking around unnoticed by the enemy and completing all my objectives without being noticed there was one point during this game in which I was able to sneak up on my target while he was looking in the fridge and caving steal his throat with out him or his bodyguards noticing but for the best part of the game the AI is a bit stupid, most of the NPC’s wonder about the place talking loudly to each other or themselves and if you do something to make them suspicious like shoot out a light they forget about after a minute and go about their day. The AI wasn’t all bad some of the guards had habit of throw flares in to dark corners to make hiding from them more difficult but they only appeared in the one level and then it was back to talking loudly idiot guards, speaking of talking loudly the voice acting in this was terrible not from the main cast but when in places like Japan all of the guards speak English for some reason. Which is annoying but not as annoying as the accents are borderline offensive, even racist.

The controls work really well in part on the 3DS, using the touch screen to access your equipment means you don’t need to go into any menus during gameplay to change weapons and instead of a whole bunch of different weapons you get two, a simple pistol and a rifle that has a number of attachment so you can change it from a sniper rifle to a grenade launcher which makes changing weapons much quicker and simpler. You get a feature where you control a fibre optic camera by tilting the console to one side or the other which doesn’t really work, as soon as you tilt it the console seems to forget that you’ve tilted it so when you bring it upright again it decides to tilt the camera in the other direction instead but that isn’t really a necessary part of the game. While I mention it a lot of the feature you get to play with don’t really seem necessary to the gameplay. The famous goggles being one, I rarely used them I found I could see a lot better without them along with a lot of the weapon attachments I didn’t really use along with a attachment which fires spy cameras which I couldn't even think of a reason to use. You can get though the whole game using the basic pistol and sniper rifle.

Overall I quit like this game, it passed the time well and for a handheld console the graphics are really good. Would I play it again?….No.

Available at Amazon