While checking out the trailer for Double Agent months before the game was eventually released, I was a little concerned when I saw Sam Fisher, the master of gadgets, remove his trademark night vision goggles and toss them into the sea. I asked myself, "How can Sam lose the goggles? They’re the source of much of his power."

As it turns out, Double Agent’s single player game does frequently strip Sam of his wonderful toys, requiring players to rely more on the environment in order to evade detection. Although this limitation takes the series in a new direction, I can’t help but feel like Ubisoft Shanghai tried to fix that which was not broken just for the sake of being innovative. Chaos Theory was the pinnacle of stealth action, and instead of building upon the pedigree, Ubisoft Shanghai chose to tear it down by crippling the player somewhat, at least in the single player department. The trade off is that players are now allowed to kick it with his enemies like a good double agent should, and the resulting moral ambiguity adds some flavor to a series traditionally weak in the story department.

For the 1st time in a Splinter Cell game, Sam Fisher will be tackling missions without some of his trademark stealth gear. 

Players are given objectives from both the NSA and the terrorists, (called John Brown’s Army,) and the player is tasked with maintaining the trust of both of his masters. The player is given some freedom to choose which side’s orders to follow, but is penalized via the game’s new trust meter for failure to comply. Loose the trust of either the NSA or JBA, and it’s game over, man. Double Agent is a balancing act, as Sam attempts to navigate the numerous, occasionally conflicting orders in an effort to remain a trusted operative and keep up the appearance that he is in fact working for the bad guys. Although players have the option of ignoring some of the requests of either side, the true challenge lies in completing all the objectives.

While he is chillin’ at the JBA’s crib, agent Fisher has practically none of his tried and true tools. He can’t even run or crouch much of the time! The developers compensate for these restrictions by allowing him to hide in lockers and under desks, and he does have his hacking and lock picking gadgets throughout the entire game, even at the JBA HQ, but it is a drastic change for the series, and conveys a sense of powerlessness in a series which traditionally instills players with feelings of power.

Sam gets access to unlockable equipment for playing missions stealthily, and many of these unlockables are new and rather powerful (like the new sticky cam that’s loaded with explosives instead of gas,) but they are only available some of the time and are largely just slight twists on the old mainstays. A new favorite gadget is a gun that emits a whistle on any surface Sam can see and shoot. This item is essential for completing some of the tougher NSA missions while surrounded by JBA terrorists, and is the most welcome edition to his array of tools.

Double Agents developer, Ubisoft Shanghai, was the team responsible for the revolutionary multi player component found in the past 3 Splinter Cell games, whereas team Montreal has always displayed a talent for pushing the limits of the single player experience. Given Ubisoft Shanghai’s track record, these changes to the campaign should come as no surprise. With Pandora tomorrow, the team created some of the best multi player around while offering up a ’more of the same’ single player experience that felt more like an expansion than a true sequel. It appears that the developer was conscious of their shortcoming regarding the single player experience in their last game, and I applaud them for attempting to innovate in an area that they have had trouble with in the past. They succeeded to an extent, but failed in other ways... kind of a ’two steps forward and one step back’ affair. So although Double Agent’s story has become significantly more interesting than past games in the series, this radical improvement to the narrative experience is at the expense of the single player game play. The story satisfies, and humanizes agent Fisher in ways unimaginable in earlier Splinter Cell games.

From a graphical standpoint, Double Agent is pretty and brings many welcome next-gen enhancements to the series, but much like Pandora Tomorrow, Double Agent isn’t as breathtaking as the Ubisoft Montreal titles. The fact that much of the game takes place in the daytime is interesting and often beautiful, but the JBA HQ portions of the game are unattractive at times and nowhere near as impressive as some of the other titles available on the system. This is noteworthy only because of the fact that Chaos Theory was possibly the best looking game on Microsoft’s last console, and players hoping to have that next-gen sense of awe and wonder may be slightly disappointed. Not an ugly game, just not the best the 360 has to offer.