OldManCoot

A paradoxically good time sink if you've realised the meaninglessness of existence. However, the keyboard controls and AI are often enough infuriating beyond belief. I'm a Level 17 Professional and this is all a bit too much to bear at this point. Especially when an auto-mobile driver in front of you suddenly decides to stop to a crawl. I absolutely refuse to do the heavy cargo missions, because I simply must reach at least 150 km/h every cargo delivery as that is the most thrilling part of the game. Speeding offence tickets are way too plentiful for my liking, not to mention the constant costs of repairs. All in all, time and place are nothing but constructs of a feeble human mind attempting to understand and categorize the world around it. Euro Truck Simulator 2 just is.

I can say this is a well developed stealth/action game. This is when Ubisoft actually put some heart and soul into this franchise. It's an outstanding game with a simple, but quite unique gameplay element - hiding in the dark. Even though it was made in 2002, the game manages to run OK on Windows 7 64-bit. The controls are something you need to learn, but in the end they make the game quite enjoyable. The shooting mechanics are a bit under-powering, but I guess that's to make you feel like you should be sneaking instead. I loved all of the interesting features such as lock-picking, shooting surveillance cams, rappelling down buildings, grabbing officers to bypass a retinal scanner, using zip-lines and scaling all sorts of obstacles as well as getting into tight places. The story is really well written, it gives a very honest feeling of actually working for national security - to prevent any threat to the nation. It's amazing how it teaches you about how information warfare works (thanks to Tom Clancy, may this man rest in peace). The cutscenes are very good as well. The characters seem alright and well detailed and the dialogue is superb. Michael Ironside does a great job voicing the main character, Sam Fisher, making him sound cold and brave, alongside a pinch of sense of humor. Also, Irving Lambert's voice actor Don Jordan The level design, while at first a bit confusing, is not bad. I like how it gives more than just one option to pass an area: shall I sneak behind a guard and knock him out or climb up a pipe to get up on the roof and then strike him from above? Speaking of guards, I am a little bit disappointed with the AI. It seems at certain points their field of view is superhuman and they can sometimes hear me when I'm sneaking as slowly as possible. This may seem like a burden for your temper, but thankfully the environment in the game is very nicely done. Many places are quite detailed and there's quite some variation as well. There are some areas in the game that make it sound like breaking into them would be insane, but in the end you can actually pass through them. The graphics, for 2002, are quite stunning. Though most of the time the player is accustomed to using night-vision, but while the goggles are off, some very fine details can be seen like the clouds, the faces of the NPCs and the guns. To top it all off, the sound quality is amazing. It feels like not one bit of quality was sacrificed when it comes to hearing gunfire, explosions, dialogue and the ambiance. I have to say I love the music too, especially when guards get a bit alerted and there's a sudden piano chord followed by a tense, ninja-esque soundtrack. But when things start to get messy, there's a perfect action theme for the upcoming combat. Overall, the last mission's soundtrack has got to be the best though. In the end, this game was a great starter for an interesting franchise. I believe this is when Ubisoft was a respectful game developer, unlike now, unfortunately.

The first horrible thing I want to note: unskippable 20 minutes lasting credits. If you're an average person with 8 hours of free time, then consider more than 4% of it wasted due to these damn long credits, so I've decided to rate the game at 4. Ok, now the other things.. First problem I noticed after starting the game was Desmond's new weird baby-face look. I didn't even recognize him at first, it was way too weird.. Moving forward through the game, the story was becoming a bit too much of a mind****, what with Ezio using magic stones to get into Altair's memories and Desmond's mental health problems.. It all seemed way too shady though as everything else from the city was trying to get your attention. What I really didn't get was all the strange new mechanics that the previous games didn't have. To be fair, it's nice to see some new mechanics, but when they come out of nowhere, often leading to your death, you can't help but feel lost in the game. For example, Den Defense seemed new, so did the bombs and new (almost unbeatable) enemies, but I never really got to understanding them all, because there was way too much detail put into them to simply easily comprehend. It would've been good if the story missions didn't endlessly tempt you. The music from Jesper Kyd was great as always, though. I really had a problem with the characters on Ezio's story, they seemed very temporary. And on Altair's side.. I don't understand what happened to his voice. He used to have that calm American accent VA which was kind of a screw-up at first, but since they decided to make him speak in an Arabic accent this time, I could barely even recognize it was the same person. It would've been better if he just spoke the same way as before, would've brought some minor nostalgia. Overall, this game is just too clunky for me to be considered good. It's like they put Brotherhood into a pile of mud, then into a blender, and slowly cooked the resulting mass into what Revelations is now..

This game is the second kick in the nuts from Ubisoft after SC:Conviction. It seemed like a half-decent game when I first heard about the Perfectionist difficulty. Now let me tell you why that was complete bull****. The whole game is just a big mess they tried to build an actual stealth system on this Conviction-esque engine. Well, it's a drunkard's decision to say the least (probably Maxime Belland at it again). It just doesn't feel natural at all like the past good Splinter Cell games Yes, even Double Agent feels better. The upgrade system seemed like a fun addition, but it's actually redundant. It's a pain in the ass that you have to buy something in order to get the next item on the list available. Also, why the hell does Sam have to buy "nanofiber vector-space quantum-silenator" pants and shoes to sneak up on someone, who WILL eventually just turn around, because the AI 'somehow' heard him coming up from behind?! How the hell did Sam manage to sneak up on guards in Conviction with cargo pants and hiking boots and they didn't even hear him at all?! I can only assume he's gotten so old, that he's got bad knees or some other idiotic reason. But it's hard to believe he's any older than 30 (55 in-game) when he looks like Commander Shepard from Mass Effect. The new voice actor is horrible too, he sounds like a depressed teenager. I don't know what the hell were they thinking when they didn't decide to have Michael Ironside as the voice actor again. Mocap seems like a sorry excuse, because it's something that anyone barely notices in comparison to just simple hand-made artificial animations... I dealt with everything up to the point where I decided to do a solo/coop mission. The one thing that cost me so many brain cells was the fact that there was no manual saving system. Every time I got caught in the mission, I had to be sent all the way back and do all the menial knock-outs and stealth passes again. I don't even know how it's supposed to be a "fun challenge" when it's just having to do the same trash over and over again. Finally, after wasting more than an hour on it, I get past it and then greeted by another two checkpoints... That means I spent a whole hour doing only one third of the whole mission. And that's where I pretty much snapped If I was about 20 or 30 years older, I probably would've smashed my screen and then proceeded to kill myself via overdose of anger management pills, downed with a bottle of Jack Daniels. I hate this game beyond redemption. It is just so bad: gameplay & controls almost identical to Conviction (which means it's bad), the characters and voice actors bland as hell, the sound and music could've been way better, the animations decent, but the fact that mocap meant no Michael Ironside it's horse****, the missions nothing but repetitive objectives, side-missions a ragefest for your brain, enemies agitating and some are overpowered, weapons & gadgets frequently ineffective (waste of all the money), upgrade system redundant, replay value barely any, because replaying it would be boring as hell, checkpoint system satisfactory for the story missions, but a kick in the head for solo/coop missions, graphics they look bad and obsolete (the menus look better than the actual game itself), and finally DLC it can kiss my hole, because I'm not giving away another single cent to Ubisoft after seeing how typically bad they messed up again. Hell, even Hitman: Absolution would be better worth called a Splinter Cell game (minus the gadgets) than this pile of camel vomit. Needless to say, the sooner Ubisoft bankrupts, the better off the world will be.

My most favorite game, because of it's almost never-ending replayability. After 7 years I can still find something new and interesting if I dig deep enough into the missions. I love the locations, the music, the gameplay... It's just near-perfect. The only flaw is the kind of nutty AI, but most often it's only a minor problem.

After finishing this game, I thought I had bought the wrong one, because it felt NOTHING like the original Splinter Cell games. It shouldn't even be TITLED as a Splinter Cell game! It pretty much drives you into starting massive shoot-outs. Only later I found out I could partially stealth through the game, which was kind of fun, but got frustrating every time I found out the good quick-saving system was replaced by a debilitated checkpoint system. It eventually drove me into doing both strategies, which I didn't like as the mixed gameplay was not pleasurable at all to me. I tried to figure out why the hell it turned into an action shooter, and I found out. The new director Maxime Béland came in and brought a bag of horse**** with him. I don't know what was wrong with this guy's life beforehand, as it seems he must've been a hopeless drunk or junkie, feeling that the "black-and-white" effect when you're in the dark reminds him of his early artwork or something like that... Well, what he did is fix what wasn't even broken in the first place and ended up making it a disappointment. The story for the game was good, to be honest, it fit with the past games, which I appreciate. One thing that I felt is that this game was produced by 12-year old because of the most idiotic and immature dialogue of enemies I've ever heard in my life of playing games. The endless amounts of hearing A-hole and the F-word pretty much make up 90% of the dialogue. It isn't even funny after the first few missions. I can understand the thugs in the game would say something like that, but even the goddamn Third Echelon soldiers say it, making it unrealistic and turning it into an immature joke. Ubisoft really shifted from a nice game company into a an evil group of greedy game developers who care only about getting customers' money and care none for the fans of the older games. The fact that Michael Ironside still voiced the game is why I give it a rating of 2. Well done, Ubisoft, you've really shape-shifted into a despicable little greedy imp.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]