 "Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Conviction")
Sam Fisher has changed. The man who was once the most loyal of secret agents now finds himself on the run from the very same agency he dedicated his life serving. After his daughter’s death and the events that transpired in Double Agent, he is very bitter and angry. And you won’t like him when he’s angry.
We all know Sam’s been through some real intense covert training back in the day but now free from the moral chains that restrained him all his life, he’s free to be as brutally effective as humanly possible. It is this aggression that’s been captured really well in his latest outing, Conviction. Doing so has caused the series to play around with its ideologies, upsetting fans in the bargain. However, if you enter Conviction with an open mind, you may appreciate the new direction the series has gone with.
For Conviction, Ubisoft has made Sam more predatory than ever before. Not only does he move faster, but he’s more agile and way more aware of his environment. Moving around levels, ducking in and out of cover and sneaking up behind enemies never felt this fluid. In the older games, getting spotted usually triggered an alarm but over here it ties into one of the game’s brand new gameplay mechanics called Last Known Position (LKP). When spotted, enemies will basically converge on your last known position - denoted by a ghostly outline of Sam - allowing you to flank them from behind and take them out with a swift melee attack.
Taking enemies out via close quarter combat will grant you the Mark and Execute ability via which you can tag multiple enemies (two at first) and shoot them silently, efficiently and stylishly. Combine the Mark and Execute ability with the above mentioned gameplay and you’ll appreciate Fisher’s badassery like never before. Taking out enemies via Mark and Execute, or fulfilling certain conditions like disappearing from them only to flank them will grant you in-game points with which you can upgrade your arsenal for both the single player as well as the co-operative campaign (just like the Persistence Elite Creation system from Rainbow Six Vegas 2). This includes anything from attaching silencers and scopes to your weapons to upgrading the blast radius of your grenades and so on.
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The game’s much hyped interrogation techniques are awesome to look at but are a bit disappointing to pull off.
Nash, as he prefers being called, woke up to the wonders of gaming rather late but don't bring that up around him. It's a touchy subject. A self confessed Battlefield veteran, Nash spent a good part of 2010 on the Steam Battlefield - with Bad Company (see what we did there?). He has a zero tolerance policy towards RTS games but is currently showing an interest by picking up and moving people - who he refers to as units - in the office. Thank God he's not that enthusiastic about Angry Birds or we'd be seeing women flying all over the place. Bali... Bali, put the receptionist down now.