Seven years and six games into the espionage of the Splinter Cell series, it was about time for the entry where Sam Fisher’s own organisation are turned against him. It took 24 a similar period to get to that one, after all, and there’s more than a little similarity in outlook between those two paranoid US security state fantasies. Conviction also has a new action-centred outlook, and a daughter in danger story, that bring it even closer to 24. It does at least come up with some inventive ways to display its paranoia, though.
Previous entries had complex gradations of darkness, night vision goggles, and evolving situations to monitor. In Conviction the night vision goggles appear only in the form of the three dot logo for autosave, and light is more binary. When you are in the dark, colour drains from the world and no one can see you. When you’re not, colour comes back. You can still shoot out lights and peek under doors, but for the most part the slow, tricksy gameplay is replaced by something more action-based, and more like every other cover-based third person shooter of the era.
There are some added complications. Get seen and your last known position is marked in ghostly outline, and there is a chance to get away and back to being hidden again. Taking enemies out up close and personal gains you ‘executions’ (interesting choice of word) – mark targets and press Y for a guaranteed instant kill. This might add a bit of strategic variety, but getting good enough at headshots to take out anyone first try is soon essential anyway, so going out of your way to earn it being done for you isn’t a strong prospect. You also get controls for bashing people’s heads against things to get them to give up information in certain set scenarios, an extension of the series’s long-running promotion of torture of all kinds as long as it’s carried out by the right people.
The simplicity allows the user interface to be minimised, which it mostly is. The welcome exception is the giant text which appears on the side of buildings directing you on Sam Fisher’s next move. It’s like a little bit of John Woo’s Stranglehold in the previously never very stylish Splinter Cell. When the buildings start displaying flickering images of the past it goes some way to visualising Fisher’s pained mental state in an interesting way, too. Even better on that front is the audio. At one point a section of exiting a base is soundtracked to punishingly industrial beats, like The Knife’s “Full of Fire” a couple of years early, busily layered with cut-up samples of a child’s voice. It’s one of the more intense and unusual things I’ve heard in playing through so many bestselling games.
The child voice samples link back to the daughter-rescuing element of the story, and specifically to a flashback which most strongly marks out Conviction’s entry into 2010’s own wave of dad games alongside Heavy Rain and Bioshock 2. An early tutorial has Fisher responding to his young child’s fear of the darkness by explaining darkness and its uses. It’s very obviously awkward but seems aware of it, and quite possible to read as a tense vision of Fisher’s paranoia.
Then some people break into the house, and as he goes out to shoot them all the giant text comes up on the wall saying PROTECT YOUR FAMILY, like some kind of NRA fever dream. The game may play with unease at Fisher’s paranoia and how far he’s gone, but it also proves him right again and again. Like Activision with Modern Warfare, Ubisoft could see the value in throwing in uncertainty and unease to provoke an emotional reaction, but take those implied critiques into a game where you work to the same ends as ever.
Top of the charts for week ending 17 April 2010:
Top of the charts for week ending 24 April 2010:
