Face-Off: Splinter Cell: Blacklist

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Developed by the newly formed Ubisoft Toronto studio, Splinter Cell: Blacklist re-introduces its covert hero Sam Fisher with a new motion-captured voice actor, throwing us into a action-thriller blender that has us terrorist-spotting our way across the globe. Level design is still heavily encouraging of the stealthy approach, where the dividing line between light and shadow not only forms the bedrock to its gameplay, but also informs the game's technical direction behind the scenes. The team's LEAD engine carries straight over from the last game with clear enhancements, ignoring next-gen formats to focus on the PS3, 360, PC and Wii U, where Nintendo's platform receives full GamePad support, while also being beset by a myriad of bizarre design choices.
Remarkably, at the game's base is the ageing Unreal Engine 2.5 which, much like the original BioShock titles with Irrational Games' focus on water physics, is heavily modified to suit demands beyond Epic's original tool-set. In Splinter Cell's case, appropriately, the renderer has been re-written to enable more complex layers of shading across a scene, with both baked-in and active ambient occlusion, silhouette shadows and multiple dynamic light sources making an impact. The result is a game that takes pride in its rich, pitch-black indoors settings, and yet finds narrative scope to let Sam explore some lush exterior areas too.
In the tradition of Ubisoft's other high-profile releases, such as Far Cry 3 and Assassin's Creed 3, this latest entry in the Splinter Cell series arguably pushes the console versions too hard, while the PC version stands as a show-boat release. All manner of trade-offs are made to make sure each version streams data fast enough to its respective hardware, with the 360's campaign mode divided across two discs - the second containing an optional 3GB HD texture pack install for the "best possible visual experience." Meanwhile, the PS3 version enforces a mandatory install of 7.9GB that takes around 25 minutes to complete, compensating for the slow read rates of its optical drive. Without any such installs to worry about, largely due to its limited built-in storage, the Wii U version is by far the quickest to set up.
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