Above: The easiest way to take out armored soldiers is by attacking them from behind.
What you won’t like
Anticlimactic story
Despite a small twist or two, the tale of The Engineers and their grandiose plan to threaten the U.S. government quickly lost my interest. It moved at a brisk pace through some good-looking locations around the world, but everything else was just noise. I stopped caring about who the villains were and why they were planning all these attacks. The secondary characters Blacklist introduces you to are also forgettable, as their roles don’t expand much beyond the capture-them-alive mission objectives.
Getting out of cover in a firefight
The cover system is a little too sticky. You can snap to the nearest object at the press of a button, but good luck trying to get out of it during a heated battle, especially if you’re going around a corner. When you’re in full-on “Oh crap, I gotta run” mode with dozens of dudes shooting at you, every second counts. And Fisher likes to waste those precious seconds by taking his sweet time to get out.
A heads-up for PlayStation 3 owners
Ubisoft gave us a near-final version of Splinter Cell: Blacklist for the PlayStation 3, and normally these special discs still have issues that the developers are fixing for the retail release. Among the notes that came with our copy was a warning about a low framerate “after several hours of play.” Indeed, this happened to me several times, usually during cutscenes. It dropped so low and so fast that the screen stuttered, as if it was having a hard time running on the console.
Given how intense and dramatic the characters can get, a low framerate completely ruins any emotions those scenes are trying to convey. In this prerelease version, you can easily fix that (for a few hours, anyway) by quitting to the PS3’s main menu and loading the game again. I have no doubt the developers will have this solved by the time Splinter Cell: Blacklist is out, but since I encountered the problem so frequently, I wanted to mention it here.
Above: If you press the button prompt for “death from above,” Fisher will jump down and stab the guy below him.
Conclusion
In spite of its uninspiring story, Splinter Cell: Blacklist creates a sense of urgency that few games can match. It gives you the tools — the guns, the high-tech devices, the goggles — to accomplish your mission and then lets you use them as you see fit. Enemies from Benghazi to London will learn to fear your sticky camera, your tri-rotor aerial drone, and your sleeping grenades … or they just might pump you full of lead if you make a mistake. But you can always reload and try again.
Score: 84/100
Splinter Cell: Blacklist is out Aug. 20, 2013 for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii U, and PC. The publisher provided GamesBeat with the prerelease version on the PS3 for the purpose of this review.