There's a running joke/truism in the music scene that most bands suffer from
the 'difficult' third album syndrome. It's not exactly a hard and fast rule
(as there are some notable contradictions), but it's usually the point when
previously unassailable success starts to unravel and the cracks start to show.
Call it overconfidence, lack of inspiration, the well of creativity running dry,
or just trying to play to the crowd, but Chaos Theory is Splinter Cell's Be Here Now.
Three steps forward, four steps back, "Chaos Theory" is the frustrating tale
of a project that's added so much good stuff to a winning formula, but walked
silently away from addressing some of the real issues that have dogged the series
right from the beginning, while also introducing some new features that either
add very little or actually detract from what made the game so compelling in the
first place. Has Ubisoft genuinely disappointed, or are these the words of someone
who expected too much? That's for you to decide.
But first a refresher. Chaos Theory is the 'true' sequel to the original
2002 stealth romp, or in other words it's the second Ubisoft Montreal Splinter
Cell game - last year's Pandora Tomorrow being largely considered something
of a filler release knocked up at Ubi's Shanghai studio to make the most of
the commercial fervour surrounding the debut classic. On that basis, this
interesting, almost unique state of affairs put Pandora Tomorrow into context.
It was creatively no more than an expansion pack in single player terms,
being little more than a set of new levels and scenarios to service the fans,
while also justifying its full price tag with a rip roaring online multiplayer
mode that was widely acknowledged as one of the true innovations in multiplayer
gaming of recent years.
With all this in mind, the stage was set for Chaos Theory to really advance on
what had gone before; improve on the storytelling, provide a more rounded, more
inclusive gameplay experience (i.e. one that didn't kill the player off every 30
seconds or checkpoint your progress with a sliver of health left), crank up the
already grand visual opulence, throw in a few new cool Third Echelon gadgets
and give the ageing Clooney wannabe the chance to show us his new rubber perv
suit and the new moves he's been learning down at the self defence class since
last time out.
Unlike SC's closest competitor Metal Gear Solid, the storyline's never been
the game's strong point. While MGS mastermind Hideo Kojima might harbour
delusions of grandeur in that department and go too far in wanting to make
grand sweeping movies with Harry Gregson-Williams soundtracks alongside his games,
at least he's trying to push things forward. Ubisoft Montreal is still floundering
very much in the malaise of old school videogame pre-mission thinking.
It's evidently trying manfully to create a convincing, focused game world
with characters the player cares about, but it's still not working. Content to
continue with the formula of stitching together fast-paced news footage, quickfire
biogs on generic arch crims and knockabout banter between Sam and his Third Echelon
employers, Chaos Theory still fails to truly engage the player in setting the scene,
or giving you a clear definition of your goals or why you're chasing so and so, and
what his role in the crime caper is. It's easy to lose the thread of what's going on,
and while that may be at least partly to do with a failing attention span, it's a
problem Ubi still hasn't addressed beyond retaining its high quality voice cast
and doing an admirable lip-synching job on its main characters. Following up its
cut-scenes with static text descriptions of what's going on feels plain lazy these days.
Where Chaos Theory gets things right in terms of scene-setting is the actual
in-game banter, which - tedious quipping about Sam's increasingly mature years
aside - really help give you a sense of place, as well as regular reminders of
why you're doing what you're doing. It's a game that really needs it too, as most
of your time with Chaos Theory will simply be a matter of engaging with
easy-to-pick-off generic goons that patrol in near darkness in easy-to-manage ones
and twos.
A typical sortie in Chaos Theory's ten levels goes roughly like this: insertion
in some random dark place of great beauty and great danger, turn on night vision
in order to see anything (being sure to shoot out any lightbulbs you come across),
crouch and sneak up slowly behind stationary or slow moving guard, grab him,
interrogate, incapacitate, save game.
Or, if you can't be bothered with the slow and sure process of sneaking up
behind people the newly enhanced close combat manoeuvres make the job of taking
out guards easier than ever. Too easy, in fact. Anyone familiar with previous
Sam Fisher adventures will probably be aghast at how straightforward the whole
procession is; especially with a 'quicksave anywhere' facility replacing the far
more challenging and sensible checkpoint system. Kill, save. Kill, save. Kill, save.
And so on.
More forgiving than Jesus
There's forgiving, and then there's just ridiculous. It was obvious some of
the more frustrating elements and difficulty spikes had to be smoothed out to
give people more incentive to carry on, but now everything's such a formality
(the new knife attacks a prime example of making things too easy)
it's hard to really care. If you mess up, you just quick load and carry on and
all that rich tension of old just melts away.
Even if you happen to alert a guard while they're busily unloading their clip into
your face, Mr Fisher has the incredible ability to knock out literally any game enemy
with one swift blow no matter what anyone else is doing to him at the time. Amazing.
While Ubi has gone to great lengths to introduce some exceptionally cool new moves
that enable Sam, for example, to dangle off ledges and yank enemies to their doom
(off the top of the Light House - genius), or hang from pipes and perform an inverted
neck break on enemies unfortunate enough to wander underneath him, you either rarely
get the chance to pull such things off, or you settle into the rapid realisation that,
actually, it's far easier and more effective to knee your foe in the bollocks or slap
your extended palm under their chin. After all, as gamers we generally take the most
effective option when presented, right?
As such, your guns are more of a hindrance than a help at times, often alerting
swathes of guards to your presence and resulting in a very quick death indeed.
In fact, while we're on the subject, you'll be regularly gob-smacked at just how
quickly enemies react to your creeping presence - one second engaged in any number
of tasks from urinating to fixing locks, and the next millisecond unloading their
gun with military precision - yet when patrolling a dark area they rarely have the
presence of mind to light up the scene.
It's probably at this latter point where you find yourself tiring of the whole
darkness mechanic. It was a huge step forward in the first Splinter Cell, and
creeping around in the dark playing hide and seek was a real buzz, but now the whole
game relies on it to such an extent that it's laughable. Even the most mundane
scenarios and locations are so dark and so obviously contrived around the central
game mechanic that it ceases to be believable anymore. Factor in odd game design
decisions that have now abandoned key Splinter Cell principles like not leaving
any bodies lying around and not triggering more than three alarms and it's a game
that - while more accessible - is dumbed down to the point of disinterest.
Once you realise there's no punishment for leaving dead bodies where you
killed them or any real incentive to avoid setting off alarms you stop playing
the game with the same degree of skill that you once did. It leaves you with a
lack of achievement, a lack of challenge and as such feels very much inferior
to previous games in the series. Apart from the fairly challenging bomb defusal
section on the standout penultimate Bathhouse level, the game's just a fairly
tired romp mainly involving taking out dozens of dumb guards, hacking doors,
checking every computer under the sun and so on until you're done.
And yet there are plenty of positive things to admire about the game everywhere
you look; things which have rightly been trumpeted to get people excited about
the game in the run up to launch. On a visual level it's impossible not to admire
the superb animation that really makes Fisher one of the most satisfying game
characters to control that there has ever been. In terms of the sheer control
responsiveness and range of movements it's just spot on and a lesson to anyone
hoping to make an action game (particular thumbs up to the new aim-switching
ability that now lets you choose whether to aim over one shoulder or the other).
Fisher is one of the only game characters who looks like he's physically
interacting with the environment, rather than having just been plonked into it,
so huge kudos there. Okay, so maybe the character models still have an overly
plastic look about them still, but the movement and level of realistic motion
capture is a sight to behold and something that Ubi has over most of its competitors.
Again, the actual game engine is streets ahead of most of the current crop of
action adventures, with the PC version in particular capable of some outstanding
texture detail, beautiful lighting and particle effects; it's just a shame that
most of the time it's too dark to show it off in its full glory.
As a whole, it's certainly a game world you'll really enjoy occupying
(although what's with the Airwaves ads for gawd's sake?). The environments
really drip with atmosphere at times, with some occasionally inspired soundtrack
dramatics designed to give you the fear blasting into action.
The diverting paths also help give the gamer a degree of choice, which is always
good to see, but it's arguably undercooked in that respect, with some hilariously
contrived crawl spaces inserted in the unlikeliest of places - just to give the
player a supposedly 'sneaky' shortcut, when it would have been more useful and
convincing to design levels more around Fisher's athletic abilities.
All too rarely does the player really get the chance to use their full repertoire
of impressive moves - the split jump, the pipe hanging, the rappelling and so on
- and all too often we're left crawling through stupid air ducts instead that simply
wouldn't exist in real life. Is it us or do these things only seem to exist in
the minds of movie and games designers? It's probably become the biggest gaming
cliché of all.
Another undercooked element of the 'new' Splinter Cell is its more 'mature'
content, which seems to consist of Sam being able to hold a knife to the throat
of his enemies, but never have the ability to go the whole hog and use it in this
situation. You can, of course, slash your foes and stab them in the gut when not
using your guns but but nevertheless we wanted Fisher to be meaner, more aggressive,
and give the enemy a real taste of their own medicine. Ultimately he's just too
damned nice most of the time.
So what of the celebrated multiplayer? For some players it might even be the main
event, especially in the light of the newly implemented co-op mode; but like
nearly all multiplayer experiences it's one that depends as much on how good your
assistants are as the game itself. Set over four levels, the co-op mode
essentially sticks to the same principles as the main single-player campaign,
but designs the level in such a way that you can work together to use moves that
enable you to get into areas you otherwise wouldn't be able to on your own.
The most obviously useful one is the Boost, which allows you to boost your
team-mate up to a ledge or pipe. Others such as the Human Ladder let a player
hanging on a ledge act as mean to climb up, while the Long Jump is an odd but
cool one that lets you throw your team mate towards a target, such as an NPC
and knock them out in the process.
Other contextual moves such as co-op Dual Rappelling and standing on a
team-mate's shoulders are pretty useful when the occasion arises, but probably
the best of all is the Hang Over, which has one player controlling a rope while
the other has the opportunity to be dangled over an NPC to perform the deadly
inverted neck break.
But as cool as all this sounds, the reality of co-op is two of you wandering
around looking for the next place to go, and if you lose each other it can be a
faff trying to co-ordinate each others plans ("I'm over by the vent" "Which one? Where?"),
especially given the absence of a map to gauge where they are. Given that it's
something of an added extra tacked onto the main event,
it's hardly surprising to note that out of the four levels, only one of them
can be considered a worthy addition. In the main these levels feel quite empty
and after a while you'll quickly want to move back onto the main versus multiplayer mode.
If you're one of the many that enjoyed what Pandora Tomorrow's maps had to offer
then you'll be right at home here, with the same maps returning here in addition
to some new ones. Once again it's two on two action; two spies
(the Sam Fishers, effectively) against two Mercenaries, with the latter playing
from a first-person perspective, being slower paced and having machine guns
and torches, but minus the athletic stealth abilities of the spies.
If you haven't tried it, it's one of the most brilliantly balanced multiplayer
experiences around, albeit one that you can only really start to enjoy once
you get to know each of the vast, sprawling maps intimately and know their weaknesses.
Until then, you'll probably get a bit annoyed with how rubbish you are at it.
The main thing to note is how Chaos Theory has basically moulded the various
multiplayer strands of old into a more coherent story mode. In other words,
different objectives are tied together in a sequential list of tasks to be
performed; so, for example, you might need to steal/protect a hard drive from a
server, set or defuse a demolition charge on a server or neutralise/protect a
particular terminal. It's not really a 'story' as such, but it just mixes things
up a bit more and means you're doing more than simply the one task.
On top of that there's the standard deathmatch between the Shadownet Spies
and the Argus PMC, or a Disc Hunt mode, which if you hadn't guessed already
is CTF in Fisher's world, so all in all, lots to do, plenty of value all round
and doubtlessly hours of entertainment for those of you who enjoy your online gaming
- but be aware that as many people that love SC's multiplayer, there are an equal
number of braying types that don't get on with it.
A small word of caution, though. We're slightly baffled why
(on the PC version at least) Ubi couldn't be bothered to keep the key-mapping
consistent between the single and multiplayer modes. How hard can it be?
Also, don't expect the visual quality of the single-player mode to appear in
multiplayer - it's two entirely different teams responsible for both, and as
such the engine appears to be a few years behind for some inexplicable reason.
Once you factor all of these distinct strands of the package together there's
definitely a lot to commend and a lot of enjoyment to be had. But our overriding
concern is for the main event, the single-player mode. This is arguably what most
people buy Splinter Cell games for, and it seems that in attempting to take the
series forward Ubi has neutered the experience to pacify those lacking the patience
to play it the way it had to be played in the early days. As such, the bottom line
for us is that it has morphed into a dumbed-down experience that is no longer
anywhere near as gripping and compelling as it once was, and while the multiplayer
does bail out the overall value of the package to a large extent, it can't mask the
decline elsewhere. We reckon we could probably see the point of what Ubisoft was
trying to achieve with Chaos Theory, but we'd need night vision goggles for that.
Maybe next time the series can go back to its roots and keep the long-term fans happy
as well, eh? It's still an eight, but only just.
cho thông tin mà ko cho link down, screenshot gì hết trơn vậy , phải vầy mới đc chứ :
