Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell 3D

Genre: Stealth / Action-RPG

Players: 1

Game Company Bad Behavior Profile Page: UbiSoft

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Review:

Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, the third game in the Splinter Cell franchise, is regarded by many to be one of the best games in UbiSoft’s Stealth Action franchise. The game was originally released on PC, Xbox, PlayStation 2, and GameCube in 2005, with HD remasters of the game coming to PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 in 2011. Portable systems also received games bearing the same title, but they were generally smaller experiences designed specifically for the handheld in question.

The release of Splinter Cell 3D on Nintendo 3DS in 2011, just a month after the launch of Nintendo’s 3D handheld, would seek to change all of that, bringing the console game to a handheld platform for the first time in a direct port of Chaos Theory. It was an ambitious undertaking, to be sure… though one can argue that it may have been ill-advised.

The visuals are the first significant problem here. To be fair, the Nintendo 3DS has shown itself to be capable of visuals on par with the PlayStation 2/Xbox/GameCube generation in other releases on the platform, but Splinter Cell’s port to the Nintendo 3DS has all sorts of issues. The environments are simple and unimpressive, characters are blocky and ugly, the heat vision mode is gone from the game entirely, and the screen is so dark that you’ll likely find yourself viewing the entire game through the monochrome night vision mode just so you can see what’s going on. Yet despite all of these sacrifices and compromises, the framerates here are still terrible, outright chugging when things get even a little busy.

At the very least, the game’s decent soundtrack and excellent voice acting largely survived the trip to the handheld, but otherwise this port takes what was a showpiece game in its original release and produces something that’s ugly and at times outright unwatchable.

When you look at the gameplay, you’re looking at additional cuts and compromises. All of the multiplayer content is gone in this version, for one thing. However, what really hurts the game here is the controls – the lack of a second stick meant that this game’s designers assigned aiming controls to the face buttons on the right side of the screen, assigning other button functions to context-sensitive touchscreen commands.

It’s disappointing that this game was released well before the Circle Pad Pro and New Nintendo 3DS, which could have rescued this game from some of its worst control issues. However, this makeshift attempt at transitioning the controls wouldn’t necessarily be a bad solution given the limitations, except they still feel incredibly clunky, and combine with a poorly-positioned camera to make even simple navigation and aiming a chore.

In the end, the core gameplay that made Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory great to begin with is still present here, but it instantly becomes clear the moment you get your hands on this game that it is far, far from an ideal way to play it. The poor graphics and performance, the awkward controls, and the multiple missing features don’t hide the fact that this was once a great game, but with all these issues, it is hard to appreciate this game on the Nintendo 3DS.

tl;dr – Splinter Cell 3D is a port of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, and while that game was one of the most highly-celebrated releases in the Stealth genre, this port is terrible, with graphics and performance issues, camera issues, control issues, a lack of features, and most notably visuals so dark that players will feel forced to play the game in night vision mode just to see what the heck is going on. You still get the sense that there was a great game here underneath the multitude of problems, but it’s hard to appreciate it in this terrible port.

Grade: C-

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