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[Grildon Tundy]

Steam says I played through the campaign on normal years ago, but I hardly remembered it. Playing on the highest difficulty this time around for a no-kill run, and I must've played a different game that first time because Blacklist is fantastic. 9 out of 10. My favorite in the series.

It seems to take the best parts of the Splinter Cells 1-3 but streamlines the controls and adds welcome cinematic flair to the presentation that was missing from the dry first games. The game lets encounters be open-ended puzzles, with many different tools and engagement options at your disposal.

Released in 2013 for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Wii U, and Windows PC, it looks great on PC 4K 120fps. This game obviously had a huge budget for the time. The textures and lighting are dated, but everything is readable and detailed, and the slick style of the interfaces & UI reminds me of Dead Space 2 (in a good way). An especially nice touch is the captions for locations and objectives that appear in-world:

The writing is about on-par with something you'd see on CBS or NBC at the time--not terrible but good enough, and not a chore. Better than most games, I'd say. I actually liked the four members of 4th Echelon, Sam's crew tasked to stop a terrorist cell from executing escalating attacks: Anna Grimsdottir (operations manager); Charlie (snarky, competent IT analyst whose arc is to become less of a twerp); Briggs (Sam's in-field backup); and Sam Fisher himself. Sam's not Michael Ironside this time around, but the VA does a great job.

I tried playing Chaos Theory recently and felt like I was constantly fighting the controls. Awkward and cumbersome. Playing this game on Perfectionist difficulty, it makes me wish they'd remake those first games but with this UI and polish. Oh wait--they're actually doing that! ...Unless they're not because it's been five years since the reveal and the project is in a "fragile" position.

Why don't they make 'em like this anymore?

 

[phant0m]

Blacklist was a great game.

And they don't make em like that anymore because people didn't fucking buy it.

 

[Kerotan]

I really liked this one

 

[Aldynes]

For me this was definitely better than Conviction by miles, the side ops with the zero alarms were great, high tension !

 

[Grildon Tundy]

Its budget was estimated to be around $20-60M, and folks typically ~x2 the dev budget to account for marketing spend. So if it was $40-$120M to produce, it sold 2M copies in its first three months, at $60 a pop, that's right at $120M (breakeven for a higher-end estimate). But Ubisoft's internal target was 5M copies sold in that first 3 months. So it wasn't a catastrophic loss. It's been over a decade, and there hasn't really been a game quite like it since.

Also it came out in August of 2013, and the Xbox One and PS4 consoles were release in November 2013. Seems like they could've gone the cross-gen route with this to get more sales. But I guess that wasn't really the style at the time.

 

[KyoZz]

It's a meh SC that's been reevaluated with how shitty everything has been since then. But compared to the original trilogy it's pretty bad.

Shitty SC, ok game.

 

[intbal]

Good game. Visuals scale incredibly well to higher resolutions. It was sort of the Arkham Knight of the 7th gen. Very visually dense environments.
I hated the plane hub. That was a major drag on the flow of the game. Should have just been one mission right after the other.

 

[Gonzito]

I love the game. I miss Splinter Cell man

 

[Polaris]

"Why don't they make 'em like this anymore?."
Because it bombed like Hiroshima.

I hope the series stays dead and the remake is cancelled.

 

[Gonzito]

"Why don't they make 'em like this anymore?."
Because it bombed like Hiroshima.

I hope the series stays dead and the remake is cancelled.

 

[VulcanRaven]

I should try this again. I remember starting and couldn't recognise Sam Fisher when the opening cutscene started. Michael Ironside's voice is very important.

 

[_Ex_]

I've beaten all the mainline SC games including this one. I think you're wrong about Chaos Theory, but I played the PC version, so perhaps it had better controls on PC than console. Most of the games in this series are excellent but would ask too much of today's "modern gamer". If I had to describe the Splinter Cell series, I'd say it's the thinking man's Metal Gear.

 

[Puscifer]

Blacklist was a great game.

And they don't make em like that anymore because people didn't fucking buy it.

People bought it but let's be real - they couldn't make it Ubisoft open world slop