Sam Fisher is Back in Action!

This time Sam Fisher has to infiltrate a domestic terrorist organization called John Brown’s Army (JBA), named after a real-life American revolutionary from the nineteenth century. The JBA is in the planning stages when you join them, and they are up to something major. Fisher is sent to prison for robbing a number of banks as a part a cover story initiated by Third Echelon in order for him to infiltrate JBA. While in jail, Fisher is quickly recruited by a JBA operative by the name of Jamie Washington, which he stages a jailbreak with. This time around, Fisher will travel from snow-covered, cold locations like Siberia, to a warm city in Congo, Shanghai, and even a cruise-ship, with many of the missions taking place in the middle of the day, which is a departure from the previous games in the series.

A new addition to the game is two trust-meters, which shows the amount of trust you have with both NSA and JBA. This adds a sense of understanding to why a mission would get aborted sometimes, which would simply mean you broke the trust of either organization by completing/not completing an objective. Most of the secondary objectives are also optional and often offer moral choices for the player to take. For instance, Fisher has to plant a bomb on a cruise-ship for the JBA. Failing to do so will mean that JBA will not trust you anymore, and the mission will be aborted. At the same time you have some optional objectives from the NSA, means to prevent the loss of hundreds of lives without alerting the JBA. It is up to you to decide what to do as you will get a few of these moral choices during the course of the game, which in the end will result in different endings. However, these choices do not affect how the main storyline plays out. In-between missions you find yourself at the JBA headquarter, where you will mostly do tasks for the NSA, such as bug the place.

The game has gotten an overhaul graphically and looks pretty good, but not mind-blowing. Some of the art assets and animations have been reused from Chaos Theory, for instance Fisher’s animations. On the audio-side of things it should be no surprise that Michael Ironside lends his voice to Sam Fisher yet again. The dialogue in the game is great, with a few funny conversations here and there. The musical score is perhaps not as outstanding as in the previous titles, but it does work in creating a diversity between the different locations you visit.

When playing multiplayer cooperatively you can no longer play through the missions together with a friend as you could in Chaos Theory, but instead you are treated with a bot-match version of the standard multiplayer, in which you play with up to two other friends and have to hack different terminals. This is very fun to play, but it would have been undeniably even more fun to play through some of the missions from single-player cooperatively. The standard multiplayer is just like in the previous games, but instead of playing against up to three other players, you can now play with up to five.