“You’re paid to be invisible” – Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow

[For the first time in a while, this is a guest post! I’m once more welcoming David C James, whose previous posts include Resident Evil – Code: Veronica X and State of Emergency. You can find David at pixelhunted.com and on twitter as @PixelHunted.]

**Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow** (Ubisoft, Xbox, 2004)

After Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow I will never forget how Sam Fisher earns his living. His job, nay, his reason for existing, is to stay out of sight. I know this because when you get spotted in Pandora Tomorrow your gruff NSA boss chews you out: “Dammit Fisher, you’re paid to be invisible!”.

I’ve developed a Pavlovian reaction horror to that voice clip as it’s what you hear just before the game boots you back to the last checkpoint, potentially erasing the last 30 minutes of painstaking shadowy special ops sneakery. Thankfully I am not the controller hurling type, as the Xbox’s Duke controller could do some serious damage at high velocities.

2004’s Pandora Tomorrow is a direct continuation of the 2002 original, with Ubisoft Shanghai and Milan taking over development while the core Montreal team worked on Chaos Theory, which would emerge the following year. This uses the same engine, lighting tech and design philosophy – to the point where it picked up some mild criticism that it’s a mere mission pack rather than a sequel.

The big USP was the debut of the ‘Spies vs Mercs’ online multiplayer mode, which turned heads with its asymmetric design of third-person stealth-based spies vs first-person armored mercs. This received a lot of praise in reviews, was widely considered the highlight of Pandora Tomorrow, and is now completely inaccessible due to the Xbox Live servers being taken down over a decade ago.

So, with the game’s best feature now reduced to a useless option on the menu screen, all that’s left is the sometimes impressive but mostly frustrating single player campaign.

My theory is that good stealth gameplay is reliant on a few design pillars: the player having good situational awareness, the game explicitly defining what being discovered entails, and enemies behaving predictably and communicating what they’re doing. Pandora Tomorrow does okay on the first two, with Sam Fisher’s various vision modes and gadgets letting you see the environment and enemies and the ‘light meter’ in the corner showing how visible you are.

But it all falls apart on the final pillar, as you cannot reliably manipulate or predict enemy behaviour. Sam is now able to whistle in this game, letting you lure baddies into the darkness, where you sneak up and render them unconscious with a swift elbow bonk. In theory..

In practice what happens when you attack an enemy is a dice roll. Sometimes they’ll obediently pass out, but just as often they’ll trigger an instant alarm state, somehow alerting their buddies in the half-second before unconsciousness. In a game where a single alarm means failure this is infuriating. It’s a flaw that would be ameliorated by quicksaves, but though later versions of Pandora Tomorrow add them I’m playing the OG Xbox version, which is checkpoints only.

This also highlights one of the major differences between early Splinter Cell and Metal Gear Solid. Kojima’s games often descend into digital hide-and-seek, with an alarm being raised sending you sprinting into a locker, crawling under a desk or huddling underneath an inconspicuous cardboard box. Pandora Tomorrow doesn’t truck with that – if you’re seen it’s usually an instant game over, which is perhaps more in keeping with the po-faced tone but also significantly less fun.

The story is also subpar, suffering from Sam Fisher having very little direct interaction with the villains, whose sinister small-pox-spreading scheme is never clearly defined. There is some grim attraction to this cynical world of wetwork, but I was crying out for a flying psychic gimp, bisexual vampire, or maniac wielding a tommy-gun made of bees.

I will grant that there is one stand-out moment. After a level spent escorting a female agent through the darkened streets of Jerusalem you both reach your destination. Then, as you’re saying farewell, you get a frantic order from HQ to execute her and have seconds to decide what to do. It’s a brilliant moment of moral ambiguity – and sadly nothing in the rest of the game comes close to it.

That all leaves Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow in a rough place. The lighting tech was dazzling in the early 2000s but ho-hum now and the gameplay is clunky and awkward. If you have superhuman patience you may be able to wring some enjoyment out of it, but for the love of all that’s holy, hunt down one of the later ports that add quicksaves and save yourself some misery.