Splinter Cell Chaos Theory Review

Next we have your main gun weapons. These include your S-7 pistol and SC-20k rifle. Your S-7 pistol always carries a silencer for obvious reasons and can also be used as your OCP to disable electronic equipment temporarily. This is especially useful when you don’t want to actually shoot out a light to make darkness your weapon to take an enemy guard down, and can also be used to blind a camera for a short period of time so you can sneak past it. The strange thing about cameras in Chaos Theory though, is that you can’t actually destroy them by shooting them. Since when were cameras invulnerable to gun fire?

In terms of your SC-20k rifle, you actually have a lot of customization options. You have two attachments for it, a force-grip and launcher. The force-grip allows Sam to use the weapon with better accuracy and the launcher attachment allows him to fire various goodies from it. Two of these goodies happen to be a Sticky Shocker and Sticky Camera. The Sticky Shocker releases an electric charge upon impact when it lands on a target. It can also be fired into the water to electrocute any unknowing enemy guards that are walking in it. The Sticky Camera is obviously used for your own personal surveillance and your view in the game will automatically switch to it when you launch one. In this mode, you can shift its point of view to get a better look at your surroundings. It also has zoom capability along with thermal and night vision lenses. To make it even more interesting, you can also use it to trigger noise for distracting nearby NPCs, or releasing a poisonous gas that will render anyone caught in it unconscious. The rifle itself also carries sniper and shotgun attachments, which will obviously in turn convert it into a sniper rifle or shotgun.

One feature that has made yet another return is lock picking. It also works the same way as it has been. You choose the option at a door, and on the screen you are presented with the inner workings of the door lock you are trying to pick. You simply tilt the analog stick until you see the pick doing its work or feel a rumble in the controller and you move from peon to peon until finished. However, a new feature that was added specifically to Chaos Theory is hacking. This can be done to computers, keypads and retinal scanners. When choosing to do this, you are presenting with a huge list of number sequences which have four numbers in each. At the bottom you will see scrolling of random numbers, and that is what you have to pay attention to in order to discover what sequence to choose. At random, a number position will highlight white for a few brief seconds and show you the number. This can be the first, second, third or fourth number, but you eventually have to figure it out before triggering an alarm. However, it isn’t hard at all, because you basically use process of elimination as you are presented with more numbers. Many times you only need two or three numbers to guess which one it is. The first number basically runs from 191-194, the second from 66-69, with the third and fourth running in various “tens” digits. That may sound confusing at first, but experiencing it first hand will easily help you understand it.

Finally, we have just what Fisher can actually do in order to be stealthy. He can of course walk along walls, climb into air vents and climb pipes or ladders. But he can also do a split wall jump, which means he holds himself above the floor with his feet against the walls on the sides of him. Unfortunately I only saw one point in the game to actually do this, so it seems like a rather pointless maneuver for Fisher. However, Sam can also do some nifty things while hanging from pipes or being in the water. While in the water, if Sam catches a nearby walking guard, he will grab him and snap his neck underwater. While hanging on a pole near the ceiling, Fisher can do an inverted neck break to passing guards. He can also fire his gun while hanging upside down, which is a pretty cool but rather pointless feature since that too won’t happen often in the game. Then he also has his trust optic cable that he can stick underneath just about any door to see what’s on the other side without actually opening it.

So overall, it’s easy to say the gameplay in Chaos Theory is fairly entertaining over the duration of the game, which features ten missions, but it gets awfully repetitive. Thankfully each mission brings something new for you to do, even if the means of accomplishing your objectives tends to be the same thing you may have done in the previous mission or any other mission for that matter. It really all depends on your tastes to determine how much you will like the game. It is pretty fun for the most part, but not exactly exciting, which is where it’s hurt a lot. Once again, just like the graphics, it seems like the gameplay was dumbed down just for the sake of the GameCube version being that way.

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory also has got to have one of the most uninteresting and uninspired endings of all time this generation. The very last thing you do in the last mission just seems so corny and will make you say, “That was it?” Then the final cutscene is nothing more than a brief showing of things returning back to normal and peace being restored. Sure the short conversation between Fisher, Lambert and Grimsdottir is rather comical because of the blatant sarcasm, but even that isn’t enough to help the actual ending out. It just wasn’t anything interesting to watch, and even though it did end the game just fine, it really makes you feel gypped.

It also doesn’t help that the credits seem to run five minutes from beginning to end. Perhaps even longer than that, and there’s no music with it! That’s the first time I’ve ever played a game that didn’t feature any kind of music in the ending credits, so that was even more of a slap to the face than the ending cutscene was. Honestly, what in the world was Ubisoft thinking when designing the end of the game? It’s pitiful and downright inexcusable. There’s no reason for Ubisoft to have made the game’s ending this poor, just none.

There are only two minute reasons for why someone would want to come back to this game after going through it once. One is to return to every mission to achieve a 100% mission rating. To achieve that, you have to complete the daunting tasks of completing all mission objectives (primary and opportunity), not get identified as an intruder one time, not set off any alarms and not have any bodies be discovered. Now while some missions are quite worth it to try to achieve that rating because it is very possible, some are just laughable in those terms because of how restrictive the level design of the missions can be in that regard. It is indeed possible to achieve 100% for each mission, but since there are no in-game unlockables, there’s almost no real concrete point to it.

There also is a two player co-op mode. This is comprised of six missions in which two players help each other complete mission objectives, take out guards and navigate the mission levels. Not exactly interesting or entertaining, but it can be something for two people to go through together. GameCube owners are again gypped in this regard because supposedly the XBox version of the game is much better because of the online option.

Ubisoft definitely made a decent effort in developing the GameCube version of their latest Splinter Cell franchise iteration, but they just didn’t do enough. They really gave us a poor delivery in almost every aspect, which is very disappointing because Ubisoft tends to have such a high reputation for this. Who knows what really made the GameCube version end up being so underdeveloped in the end. Perhaps they just weren’t expecting high sales of the game on the system, but even that shouldn’t warrant laziness in overall game design. If you want your games to sell well no matter what console, you should make the effort to utilize the system’s capabilities to their fullest. However, Ubisoft truly failed in this regard, in giving GameCube owners something they can hardly be proud of. The graphics are hardly impressive, the gameplay is fairly good at best, the replay value just isn’t really there and the great music and sound effects aren’t enough to make up for all the shortcomings. If you find this game around $20 in stores, it’s probably worth the pickup, but anything else above that just isn’t worth it. If you can’t find it cheap, stay away from this game. However, if you are a hardcore stealth genre fan, this may be more worth your while than otherwise.