With his back to a corrugated shipping container, Sam Fisher touches the blood groove on his high-carbon steel combat knife as he contemplates his next move. His OPSAT calmly informs him that there are five bright yellow blobs in his immediate vicinity: at ground level Fisher knows that these innocuous dots are heavily armed and highly-trained Arab terrorists. Two are roaming in circuits several metres behind the mesh of a high-voltage electric fence – a liability, for sure, but not his most pressing concern. That would be the two patrolling his compound with flashlights, but despite being besieged in the centre of terrorist missile silo encampment, Fisher feels relatively safe in shadow cast by the container. For now.

There’s one other guard, his back perilously turned toward Fisher, a little more than two feet around the corner of the container. He’s stationary for the time being, but his position perpendicular to a well-lit power supply for the electric fence means any tampering with the cable on Fisher’s part would undoubtedly alert him. The guard also stands in the shadow, and the dark cavity inside the container would make an ideal hiding place for his corpse. It would mean a particularly difficult flanking manoeuvre for a stealth kill, but Fisher has chosen his target. Timing his approach so that the yellow blobs are at the furthest point possible when his target is neutralised, Fisher flattens his back to the container, sucking in air through his mouth to minimise the sound of his breathing and clutching the black latex grip of his knife as he tentatively closes the last few inches to strike.

The guard unexpectedly turns toward Fisher. He’s just shifting position and still isn’t aware of his presence, but now Sam’s in danger of alerting the whole camp, putting his life, the mission and, ultimately, the fate of millions of people into jeopardy. He remains stock-still for several excruciating seconds while the guard casually scratches his face beneath his balaclava, before mercifully turning the opposite way. Fisher doesn’t waste a second: closing the tiny gap between them, his left arm slips around the guard’s, pinning it to his side while expertly twisting his right wrist into an agonising grip. Simultaneously, Fisher’s right hand has brought his combat knife to the guard’s throat and a well-placed nudge in the small of his back has set the guard’s centre of gravity inches behind him. He’s perfectly poised to strike but before Fisher can deliver the lethal blow, a searching flashlight picks him out of the shadow.

He swiftly finishes the job, but the dead guard’s chance decision has sealed Fisher’s fate. The whole camp has now been alerted, and even as he pulls his semi-automatic SC-20K, Fisher realises that the game is up. Ah, sod it. The last checkpoint was only a few minutes ago anyway, time to reload and try again for the fifth time…

Whatever happened to the revolution that was supposed to be ‘new’ games journalism? Thank God it never took off in a big way, because we dread the thought of such pretentious and uninformative diatribe dominating the scene. It does have its place, however, and in this case it serves to illustrate just how immersive the Splinter Cell series is.

Double Agent is no exception either, with every mission you’re made wholly aware that your every failed action has some kind of consequence, ranging from merely alerting other guards on the ‘easy’ setting, to a massive loss of trust from either one of the two factions you’re covertly working for, and inevitable mission failure on the ‘hard’ difficulty setting. Although the general path you need to take to complete your primary objectives is clear from the start, you’re faced with such a plethora of choices from the outset and throughout each level that it feels anything but linear: where and when to hide and when you can successfully leg it. Which guards you can merely avoid and which to incapacitate. Which guards do you kill and which do you knock out, and where you hide the bodies when you’re done. This level of immersion is obvious even on the optional training missions at the beginning of Double Agent, but as your equipment roster is slowly revealed, rotated and expanded with each mission, the range of options and scope for opportunity becomes wider and wider. Do you run an optical cable under that doorway or blindly sneak straight in? Is this an opportune moment to shoot a sticky camera, or is the risk of alerting guards too great? Can you afford the time to tap into that encrypted file, crack the code and switch the power off, or do you just run the gauntlet of spotlights ahead of you? The sense of tension from deliberating over these options is palpable, and the precious few seconds that you have to seek out cover when caught in the open will set your heart racing. Ultimately, Double Agent is a game that’s made up of intelligent decisions, clever timing and hell of a lot of trial and error. So it’s fortunate that Ubisoft has included a fair number of regular checkpoints that you can restart from because, despite having a ‘save’ option, you’ll inevitably get so caught up in the action that you’ll forget to save at some point. For Splinter Cell veterans that prefer to play on the notoriously unforgiving ‘hard’ settings, this will save Double Agent from degrading into frustration.

The fact that this is the fourth in the Splinter Cell series, and one of the many franchised Splinter Cell games shows in the detail of the interaction with your equipment. Being a Tom Clancy title, the series obviously had a wealth of experience and knowledge from an ex-special forces operative to fall back on, and even the original Xbox game boasted the details that only an expertly informed game could possible convey and that Tom Clancy fans hungered for. But three games down the line and Ubisoft has honed the series to the point that Double Agent’s attention to the intricacies of every piece of equipment is a work of art. And this isn’t just reflected in the satisfying mechanical ‘clunk’ and ‘chink’ as magazines are fitted and rounds chambered, Fisher’s application of the optical fibre and the resulting fish-eye view is exactly as you would expect it, even though you’ve probably never used one before, and for those that didn’t join the cadets or have never been involved in any outdoor pursuits, clipping your carabiner to a secure point and abseiling down a building feels just right. But in-game lock-picking probably communicates the experience better than anything else – especially picking the more sophisticated locks with circular tumblers on the safes and highersecurity devices. All you’re doing is rotating the left analogue stick in either a clockwise or anticlockwise direction, but the flashes from the green indicators at the bottom of the screen that the tumbler is about to slide into place, your tentative response to these visual cues and the accompanying ‘clink’ as you hit the sweet spot couldn’t provide a more authentic and tangible experience. Throw in the pressure of being spotted by patrolling guards and subsequent race to get the job done without fumbling the lock, and you’re getting a genuine feel for a real covert situation.

This focus on stealth rather than gung-ho action brings it into close comparison with the Hitman series, and true enough the two franchises have many parallels. But while Blood Money threw you to the lions, merely telling you who you must assassinate and then firing the starter gun, Double Agent contrasts it by providing multiple objectives, some mandatory to your progression, some optional. It could be argued that to become wholly authentic, the Splinter Cell series must evolve and strip away these constraints, giving you a single primary objective, stating the prerequisites for mission failure and then allowing you to go any way about it. But to do this would only serve to take some of its identity away from it and besides, Hitman’s single objective with each mission is very simple: whack a target. Splinter Cell, on the other hand, has an intricate plot that gives rise to all sorts of missions, which include stealing documents, infiltrating terrorist organisations, planting bugs and killing (or not killing) specific people. And it’s Double Agent’s story that marks it out from the other games in the series, and that’s just as well too, because there’s not much for the fan to distinguish between otherwise. It’s definitive Splinter Cell alright, with some enhancements and tweaks. It’s a hell of a lot more Hollywood than it used to be too, with audacious stunts and scenarios, such as the prison riot and Shanghai Hotel, but your general experience won’t vastly differ. This isn’t a bad thing, we hasten to add, as it’s such a great formula anyway.

What is bad, and in these early days of the PS3 it’s a disappointment we’re frequently encountering, is the reflection of the PS3 capabilities, superficial and beyond. Despite the beef of the PS3’s GPU, this PS3 version is graphically poorer than the six-month-old 360 game, with standard lighting effects, bland textures and some serious clipping issues. It also fails to take us into the current generation console experience we’re anticipating: where’s the next level of AI and player interaction? These seem to have taken a retrograde step even, with enemies sometimes making the completely brainless decision to face a wall when on guard duty, and you’re inability to remove electronically tagged clothing, meaning you have to carry a corpse to tag-activated doorways rather than wear his jacket. What Double Agent PS3 boils down to is a genuinely exciting and absorbing experience that does justice to the series and won’t disappoint fans. However, if you’re expecting a definitive PS3 experience, then gird yourself guys, because this isn’t it.

Ben Biggs