Splinter Cell Double Agent (Mobile)

Now I haven’t played a Splinter Cell game (or any mobile game in the past for that matter) so I really didn’t know what to expect as I booted this game up on my sparkling new Nokia 6233 but I had heard a lot about developer Gameloft’s high quality and as expected, Double Agent was a treat for sore eyes. Not only does the game look pretty wicked for a side scroller but it manages to pack in all the thrills of the console version in the palm of your hand.

The story of Double Agent’s Mobile version is pretty similar to its console brethren; only it’s not all that detailed and fleshed out. And in case you’ve not played Double Agent at all, here’s a quick recap; Sam Fisher’s daughter has been killed in an accident and now as a man with nothing to live for, he undertakes the most dangerous mission of his life that sees him infiltrating the highly nefarious JBA (John Brown Army) army. Throughout the game you’ll have to perform missions for both the NSA as well as the JBA (hence the name Double Agent) with tons of moral choices cluttering your tedious journey (no one said being a Double Agent was easy).

The game starts off with Sam rescuing Jamie Brown from prison to gain access into the JBA after which you’ll embark on a plethora of diverse missions like disarming bombs, broadcasting transmissions for the terrorists, retrieving nuclear devices etc. Now even though Double Agent is an action platformer you can’t go around blindly killing everything that moves since that would get you killed pretty fast; stealth is still the name of the game here and you have to make sure you conceal yourself from the enemy at all times. If you are the sloppy variety and fail to do so you’ll trigger off an alarm due to which every enemy in the vicinity will get alerted of your presence and reduce you to Swiss cheese. To avoid this sort of an unfortunate incident all you have to do once spotted is lay low till the Alarm meter comes down to normal.
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To provide a certain amount of respite from all the stealthy platforming the game even boasts of certain cinematic moments where you’ll be chased by a helicopter or you’ll battle a man-eating shark underwater (that fight was so awesome, made me wonder why it wasn’t included in the console version). Being a side scroller doesn’t mean Sam doesn’t have his repertoire of trusty movers intact; he can rappel down buildings, breach rooms just like Logan Keller and his merry men from Rainbow Six Vegas, take enemies hostage, break necks while hanging onto overhead pipes and lots more. Every mission bestows you with a new weapon so there is a healthy amount of variety to be found in this game and like I mentioned earlier, there’s a descent amount of mission variety over here so the game never gets boring or repetitive; unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of content to pull you back once you’ve completed the game which basically means the game has pretty low replayability value.

Another minor gripe I had with this game was that there’s no way of saving your progress until you finish the entire mission so if you do leave a mission half way, you’ll have to start it from scratch the next time you fire up the game.

Since I haven’t played any of Gameloft’s previous Splinter Cell games in the past I really don’t know how this game stacks up in comparison to older games but it’s an engrossing, entertaining and action packed experience that should definitely be experienced by newcomers and veterans alike.