Just a overall smaller game than the first one, the levels are shorter, the designs are tighter, some are in the daylight that make you have no proper idea when you are hidden or not, the enemy placement is much more annoying and clustered, and there's way too much tailing segments.

It has some cool locations like the train or Jerusalem, but the highest points are so very short, you will finish this game thinking you are still in the half way point of the story of how much it feels disjointed.

It is pretty clear that this was made by a B team while the main devs were creating Chaos Theory, which was what happened.

this game might be better than the original.

While the original game was some shit about taking down a russ-dictator bent on warcriming the planet , this game has a much more James Bond type of setup thats about stopping armageddon.

You have some great levels here that strike a perfect balance between really pushing you to be stealthy and then a few segments where you can cut lose and use all your gadgets.

Overall much more memorable than the first and with a few improvements that seem really missing when you go back to splinter cell 1.

messy collection of thoughts

Somewhat better than the original (maybe?). The level design feels less restrictive than what I remember from there, though it's still incredibly rigid and doesn't attempt to hide to it. Guards, cameras, light, shadows, all objects, really, are set up in such an artificial manner that the developers may as well have put a big blinking arrow telling you where to go. It ends up feeling less like sneaking and more like instinctively following the clear path created for you.

I'm not expecting Thief or Hitman levels of openness either, just some interesting bits of level design, Metal Gear Solid 1 and 2 are both fairly linear stealth games and provide more interesting scenarios than anything here. I know Splinter Cell is capable of it too, the last mission shows it. You enter an airport to take down some terrorists, standard stuff, but you suddenly get notified that some are disguised as civilians. Now you're actually challenged by having to stealthily take out specific targets, keeping yourself and their deaths hidden from the real civilians. It's far more exciting than anything the game has done before, and I had a spike in joy before realising this was only happening in the last level.

Mechanics here are fine, mostly the same as the original but with a couple new additions. The gunplay is still terrible, however. "Aiming in" is slow and spread is wide, even reaching beyond the crosshairs at maximum accuracy. Quicksaving before any attempt at shooting a light is practically essential. I still don't understand either why Ubisoft have created an accuracy system that discourages you from playing this like action game, yet there are several forced shooting sequences.

Pandora Tomorrow also has real issues with not utilising its mechanics enough too. Sticky cams and rappelling and shooting upside down from pipes and sneaking through gaps by hugging walls and that weird split jump thing that you can climb from, those are all cool but they're barely used. When they are it's usually because they're the only thing you should do. This makes the existence of the boring level design just that bit more frustrating. The mechanics needed to give it flavour are there, just not implemented enough.

This game has some of the most inspired level ideas in the entire series--the train, Jerusalem, LAX--but the whole thing is riddled with little issues that bring the whole experience down. Granted, some of that is on the PC port (I was playing with the shadows fix, don't worry) but some of it isn't. Hair-trigger guard AI, occasionally illogical level design, and a half-baked story make the whole thing feel significantly less polished than the original. The story is truly bizarre and the game just kind of ends all of a sudden. I still don't know why it opened with a close-up shot of someone in handcuffs, and the ending made me laugh out loud.

Still! It's very much worth it if you really like Splinter Cell. When it hits, it really hits. And you get to play Chaos Theory afterward!

Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow: This lousy follow-up is deservedly forgotten by Ubisoft, but every bizarre thing about it added enough sickening 'charm' to get me to (regrettably) complete the thankfully-brief thing. It's somewhat hard to get a copy, but Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow proves that scarcity does not equal value. TL;DR at the end.

I say "hard to get a copy" but truly, if you'd like to play Pandora Tomorrow for yourself (which I do not recommend), some light Googling will have you downloading it in no time. What I mean is you cannot buy the game on Steam nor Ubisoft's own Uplay: the only 'legit' way to play Pandora Tomorrow is buying a disc and I'll bet you'd have a tough time finding a copy at Gamestop. Say you buy it, though, a copy of Pandora Tomorrow for PC or the Splinter Cell Classic Trilogy HD for PS3 off Amazon or something: you're still in for issues. After paying about $15 or $70 (respectively, at time of review), you will either need to apply your own patches to get the game running or see the not-so-HD textures that fans didn't appreciate in the PS3 version. Word on the 'net seems to be Ubisoft couldn't be bothered to fix graphical issues in the PC version (though there's gotta be more to it than that), so they've just seemingly pretended the game never happened and let some random guy on the internet fix their mess for them. There's a close-up of Lambert drinking from a mug with the Ubisoft logo in a cutscene. Disgusting.

But the game! Once you finally got everything going, is it worth it? Absolutely not. I see strange praise for this game online to this day and I'll simply never understand it. Apparently the big development focus this time around was improving the lighting and shadows, but I could barely tell. Nothing about the game looks too special, just servicable and maybe slightly better than the original, and in fact many areas that looked dark had my sensor telling me I was standing in a floodlight. This combined with hair-trigger guards and their near-instant "sound the alarm" reflexes just brews up painful tedium. They can somehow report you to HQ from the grave, too. Expect lots of save-scumming and prayers of patience to the quick-saving/loading gods, because brother? You'll need it. There's no score of any kind at the end of a level, and most let you trip three alarms before game over; but if you're like me, you'll see that 1/3 alarms on the garbage HUD and sigh before going back to painfully do it 'correctly' this time.

Pandora Tomorrow's story will wash over you and leave nearly no trace behind. You may as well be asleep at the wheel just as the writers, voice actors, and animators were, because you won't really know what's happening while it's happening. Is anything even happening? Well, some guy named Sadono is planning on smallpoxing America and only his daily dead man's switch-like phone calls are keeping the virus at bay. Third Echelon is running out of patience and Sadono is running out of anytime minutes, so Sam Fisher and his team have to dunk on 'dono before PANDORA TOMORROW. There's a train level that's kind of neat but can be completed in like 4 minutes, clearly shoved in there to get a return on the art team's budget, sort of like with Uncharted 3. The final cutscene and Sam's solution to a smallpox bomb is hilariously stupid and I could never spoil such a 'great' moment. There is zero replay value.

Tonally, this game feels feverish and directionless and not much like the previous nor future Splinter Cell games. There's a literal on-rail shooting gallery segment (a NEW breed of stealth). At one point Sam is urgently messaged and told to murder the unarmed woman in front of him and if you do so, you're never told why, but given a "Trust me, bro." This sort of bothers Sam, who brings it up again later, but is just told nothing again. It's weird, though, because Lambert is supposed to be a good friend of Sam's, you'd think he'd give him something, but Sam stops caring at this point. 'Trust the feds', yeah fucking right.

It plays like a Splinter Cell game, for the most part. Everything feels pretty flimsy this time around, I could trip up enemy scripts by walking into a room they were breaching from the other side and just leaving it quickly (from whence I came). They paused in place and didn't know what to do anymore, apparently. There were other issues, like alt-tabbing out meant you'd never be able to fullscreen the game again. I had a hard crash during a level's intro cutscene (these all look like old GI Joe commercials), and of course the autosave for the level is immediately after said cutscene, making me repeat the end of the previous level. Sadono killed me once and, during the subsequent game over screen, he grabbed for a radio that wasn't there and said "Radio Sadono, he'll wanna hear about this." I know the timelines don't match up, but if you had told me this was an eight-year-old mobile game ported to PC, I'd believe you.

Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow is not a good game. The stealth and mechanics surrounding it are flimsy, many times Sam is required to shoot his way out of a situation - yet, like the first game, shooting more than one bullet is sort of a nightmare - and the plot is dull and hardly there. I don't see how anything about this game could captivate you other than wondering the eternal question, "How the hell did this get made?" Trust me when I say no one needs to bother finding out. Let Pandora Tomorrow stay forgotten, we're all better for it.

TL;DR: If you want a good stealth game, it's barely here, and if you want a fun shooter, it certainly isn't here. Pandora Tomorrow is unsure of what it wanted to be, but one thing's for certain: it's best left forgotten and unplayed. Never played it and are still curious? Just play Chaos Theory again, trust me.

Just a note on the PS2 version of Pandora Tomorrow: this is a deeply cursed way to play this video game. The PC version was infamously on fire at launch, and I didn't feel like installing any mods to fix it (you also can't actually buy it digitally on any real storefront) - so I decided to try the PS2 version.

This game has maybe the worst loading I've ever experienced in a game. Almost every area is bookmarked by a load or a save; and saving isn't some quick thing with a little spinning icon on the bottom of the screen. You walk through a door, they throw a menu at you, you pick a memory card, you say 'yes I wish to save' and you sit there and watch it work. Then you walk into the next area and there's a load - and the loads are long.

Obviously some compromises were needed to get the beefy PC/XB version on PS2 but this is a bridge too far, to me. Especially having played the original game on PC and finding it to be a sleek, relatively modern experience despite its age.

Retiring this version forever, and I've decided I will jump through the hoops needed for PC because I don't want to skip this game outright.

Splinter Cell is one of my favorite genres of game (Stealth!) and a series that holds a pretty special place in my heart, despite not being super on top of the series in general. One of my fondest memories of my old Xbox was playing through the first VERY difficult Splinter Cell game and being entranced by the tactical gameplay and slowed down pace of action. The main character is a gruff old goat voiced by Michael Ironside who very much brings his A-Game in terms of growl and depth. The first game I replayed very shortly prior to my first 52 game challenge so I do have a decent memory of it and decided to skip it in a Splinter Cell series playthrough. So I decided to buy 3 games on my Xbox One because they're on sale and backwards compatible and started with the second game in the series - Pandora Tomorrow. I never actually got to play this back in the day, I skipped right to Chaos Theory.. so how was this very old stealth game to start off with?

Actually pretty darn good!

Sam is back for another generic adventure with a Bad Guy of the Week, this one an East Timor 'freedom fighter' who plays himself as a new Che Guevara trying to lead a revolution against the US on the world stage. He's basically just a jumped up terrorist and drug dealer however who has a major edge - several smallpox bombs he has smuggled into the US. Plus, he has a dead man's switch on all of the bombs - if he goes down, they go off. So how do we settle this? Sam sneaks about a bunch of a BROAD variety of locales, konking folks over the head and snooping around to get the thing that Lambert snidely wants! While the in-mission goals don't vary too much, the level designs themselves and the art directions for each are pretty wildly different. There's a dense jungle you're sneaking through in the late evening (that sun is still up don't you worry..), a fast moving train that's quite a stand out, a base leading to a fricken' submarine you get to fight your way out of, LAX airport!, and a couple others that were all at least decent if not pretty good? Quick aside as well on the art style - friggen' outstanding. There is such an EXCEPTIONAL use of dynamic lighting in every single level, it makes the darkness you are supposed to be hiding in feel good to make use of. There were several spots in each level where I'd say "Damn this looks tight for a 15+ year old game)

While the maps are solid, and the gameplay fundamentals themselves are good (the light/shadow and sound mechanics are fuckin' rock solid stealth systems, they give the player the perfect amount of info on how concerned the player needs to be on being discovered) sadly the levels a bit too linear to be genuinely great.. 90% of the time there is a very clear path the devs wanted you to take and no derivation from it is acceptable or will be rewarded. There were plenty of low fences I wanted to hop over, doors I wanted to go through out of order, or areas that just respawned bad guys for no reason other than the plot needed to. It was very unfortunate knowing that the sequel (we'll get to that one soon!) does such a great job with it, but honestly I was shocked when I replayed the original a couple of years ago to discover it had the exact same issue.. Well it was one of the first real attempts at the stealth genre on console, you gotta' start somewhere! Also the game lacks a proper save system other than checkpoints, and there were some damn ANNOYING sections I had to do 5+ times to get exactly right because I really had no fuckin' idea where the game wanted me to go or do so I had to wander around - and in a few of those places one mistake period meant going back to the damn load screen... very frustrating.

I don't often love replaying older games - the clunkiness, the graphics, the voice acting and storytelling are just not up to our standards... and in a lot of ways, Pandora Tomorrow has all of that. Picking up items and objects are rote animations, abysmal checkpoint system, voice acting is BAD except for Lambert and Ironside, the story/villain are pretty one-note and simple with no real overarching plot for the series... all of these things are true, but ultimately I had a damn good time just exploring these levels, marveling at a work more than 15 years old and being delighted to lurk in the shadows and pounce on some unsuspecting mercenary goon then slink back off into the shadows to strike again...

If you liked the first game you should enjoy this too!

It's still just as challenging as the original if not more so in certain aspects. It definitely brought over the best features from it as well and lessened some of the weaker elements like having far fewer dogs and improving the aiming system lol. There's still no quicksave option though on console which is frustrating ngl.

Overall though I still had fun and this is a worthy follow-up.

Una buena apuesta en lo referente a los juegos de espionaje y sigilo. Pandora Tomorrow llega a la Game Cube de Nintendo con las mejores gráficas en lo referente a sus múltiples ports entre consolas y con nuevas misiones que solo se pueden encontrar en el pequeño disco del cubo nipón. Es un juego que hace honor a la paciencia y la táctica, implementando mecánicas que no les serán de mucho agrado a los jugadores acostumbrados a disparar en todo momento. Un título muy bien concebido, con un diseño de niveles bastante sorprendente y una historia que logra convencernos. Recomendado para todos, solo es cuestión de probarlo para darse cuenta de su calidad.

Pandora Tomorrow...honestly, what a nothing game. Even after finishing it, the events of the plot and the levels themselves escape me. It's like it all went in one ear and out the other, except this isn't some lecture from my high school algebra class.

Lambert has had a change in voice actor for this game, alongside a change of character. He and Sam are no longer cracking jokes at each other all buddy-buddy. In fact, Lambert's serious tone feels downright abrasive against Sam in many cases. There's a new guy on your team whom I cannot begin to remember the name of, he feels like such an afterthought (looked it up, his name's "Brunton"). Sam still keeps his mostly serious, occasionally sarcastic quips. Story is something something Indonesia, something something Smallpox, something something viruses. For some reason I really couldn't give less of a crap.

The game doesn't have any huge setpieces or interesting bits that come to mind. There were like, some frozen brains, a brief infiltration inside a submarine, and a section where you had to stay under a spotlight to prevent a guard with night-vision goggles from seeing you. I mostly remember how when the game asks you to do something highly context-sensitive, you know that section is going to be a real stinker. The alarm limits placed on you are extremely game-y in design, and not in a fun way. Far too much of this game is like playing Metal Gear Solid 2/3 on "European Extreme" difficulty; aka, being spotted is an instant game over. One of the ways the game raises the alert counter feels like it's downright cheating. If you don't bother to hide bodies in darkness, the game performs a rudimentary check as you pass certain points in the level, and raises security by one level. The problem becomes clear if you keep advancing after that happens: it'll keep happening at each subsequent point until your alert count fails the mission. On that note, a ton of the levels in this game take place in broad daylight, which feels weirdly unfitting for a sneaking game. In simpler terms, there are a lot less light sources you can shoot out to negate (unless you could shoot out the sun like a lightbulb this whole time, and I just didn't try to).

This game was made by Ubisoft Shanghai, Splinter Cell's "B-team". In the shadows behind Pandora Tomorrow, Ubisoft Montreal was working hard on Chaos Theory, giving it some extra time in the oven. I feel as though I enjoyed the first Splinter Cell more than this, so the A-team must have an understanding of Splinter Cell that the B-team clearly just couldn't grasp.

It is with a heavy heart that I also slap an 'ABANDONED' on the PC version of Splinter Cell 2. While functionally much, much better than the PS2 version, my first two hours with it were pretty dull -- feeling like a samey retread of the first game, but with much less interesting level design.

A cardinal sin came for me at the end of the Paris level. You crawl through an air vent, into a locked room some enemies are trying to get into. After some brief story dialogue, you see enemies priming a bomb to open the locked room. I died on my escape (they heard me trying to crawl through the vent), so I quick loaded and had an idea! Before entering the room, I dropped a smoke grenade from the vent to the floor below! So the enemies trying to break into the room passed out, and were no longer a threat! I played through the same dialogue as before, but this time there was no bomb-prep cutscene because I had dispatched the enemies.

HOWEVER! The level is unfinishable without the bomb. You need the bomb to blow open the door to allow you to extract. And I had already used up my one quick save slot after taking out those enemies, so my only other option was to REPLAY THE ENTIRE LEVEL AGAIN, AND NOT BE AS CLEVER! Why the enemies are killable when they are needed for story progress I do not know, AND the game doesn't even give you a proper 'hey you messed up, here's a checkpoint' fail state. It's insane that innovative play like that in a stealth game just lets you fuck yourself in that manner.

Anyway, I have no desire to replay the entire level, so we're calling it quits here.