Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory Review

It's still great but most people have said that already. It easily has the best level design in the series, and a reason for this is because while the game is still ultimately linear, the individual "stealth rooms" gives you way more options to tackle your objectives. For example, a stealth challenge can present different ways to deal with guards, you could whistle a guard over to you and try to bypass them, use the OCP and temporaily disrupt a light source, shoot out a light and risk a guard being much more aware of your prescence, knock out or kill enemies with an instant tap of the bumper, grab them and then human shield and shoot them in the head with the pistol, use the 40K and the gadgets, or find an alternate stealth path with Sam's climbing and there are much more of them compared to the first 2 Splinter Cells. Another aspect this game does well is the AI, this might be the closest thing to a stealth game having "unscripted" patrols while giving you leeway of predictablity to make the game playable. The game makes you feel like an actual ghost more than anyother stealth game ever made. Guards are scared out of their mind to even want to search for you and when you are alerted, they just fire like crazy and hope you die fast, it's a nice change of pace compared to the trigger happy bloodthirsty guards of the first 2 games. The mechanics are as great as they have ever been and the addition of a noise meter plus the way Sam animates is unrivaled in 3rd person stealth games. Sam has a variety of movements in his crouching animations and Sam will move even slower when close to guards.

The story is the best in the SC series up until that point mainly in that it's an interesting enough conspiracy that makes you interested how it will unfold when you get through level after level. The banter between Sam and his team are great and it does have a weird subtext of Sam getting too old in the age digital warfare. The music is also really good and fits the game as well as being one of my favorite OSTs in gaming.

Now, on to the bad, the map is horrible, really bad, it's laid out in a way that is too confusing to be of any geniune help, maybe that is the point but it makes me wonder why does it have a map. I tend to use it whenever I get close to an objective. Another strange thing about the game is that the game gives ledge, pipe, and from water kills but barely gives you any opportunities to use them, it feels weird that they are in the game when they barely even pop up. And while the story is the best SC was up until that point, the villains like Shetland and Otomo basically just monologue their whole character before something dramatic happens which I find to be rather irrating in games like this because it just feels like they are revealing their characters last minute. There isn't a really surefire way to fix this outside of long cutscenes and we got another series to play if you want that, but at the same time, it isn't super compelling. Some of the level bottlenecks can be annoying but overall, great game, it's a must play.