Coming from one of the most aggressively average games ever made, I didn't expect this to be much more than an expansion pack disguised as a sequel to give people something before the actual sequel got released. I mean, Pandora Tomorrow is exactly that (it wasn't even made by the same studio that made both Splinter Cell and Chaos Theory), but what I didn't expect is for it to be worse than the previous game.

First off, mechanically it is exactly the same. Yes, it has some new things but those are merely details or gimmicks used for certain situations, but not something meaningful. One good thing I'll say about this one is that it is less restrictive than the previous game. The three alert-limit is still there, but if you don't raise the alarm too continuously it will be reset back to 0, and now with each of the three stages of the limit before it's game over, enemies will start wearing bulletproof vests after the first alert and helmets after the second one. When you reach the third stage it is game over, obviously. And while this is a much better approach than last time, not only half of the levels are still “trip the alarm once and it's game over”, but also I find it really stupid how after having spotted the bodies of various of their comrades, they still decide to reset the alert level to 0 like nothing happened.

I don't know how, but they fucked up the enemy AI. For some reason, if you kill someone, regardless if you killed it in the shadows or under the light, if there's another enemy around, he will know where the body is and go there to raise the alert level, or they will even spot the body from afar anyways, who cares. These time they are way too sensitive to anything you do. If you knock-out someone in the shadows they'll STILL notice it if it's somewhere near, even if there's a wall in-between. In the original Splinter Cell, the enemy AI could be exploited in some ways that made them look stupid, but it worked since it was a really, really straightforward and linear experience. Don't get me wrong, it's still straightforward and linear, it's just that now they've gotten smarter. They also used to move erratically and unpredictably when you alerted them, which is something more notorious this time around. The whistle button is, probably, the only useful addition this game has is necessary to walk past certain enemies, and will come in handy for these moments, and they happen very often, so now you'll need to become best friends with the whistle button, and if you don't you'll get many, many game over screens.

It still has a lot of gimmicky set-pieces (although maybe less than in the previous game), and it still has a lot of trial and error. Especially this last one. It has a fuck-ton of trial and error. More and more annoying than before. Since enemy AI is smarter, now you'll need to make millimetrical movements and follow the script without failing just once if you don't want to get noticed. This wouldn't be so problematic if enemies didn't drain all your health and effectively kill you so goddamn fast, but they do, and when the alarm goes off, soldiers will come from out of nowhere to kill you. This got to a point of annoyance where I dreaded about the simple thought of inserting the game disc. I didn't want to play this.

All this makes an already bad game an even worse one, but what is significantly worse is the story. The story in the first Splinter Cell was so ridiculously basic, uninspired and generic that I wasn't paying much attention to whatever super-serious crimes were being committed by super-serious terrorists with super-serious plans. It was cheesy more times than anything, but it did get me interested enough to finish it. This made the patriotic propaganda more bearable. But this time the story is bad, it's really bad, and the propaganda levels are off the charts. If we decide to look at this as a simple story, putting the propaganda aside, it is bad. No character has any personality or development, the conflict is poorly told and extremely overdone, the enemy leaders are so cartoonishly evil that it's ridiculous. Nothing about it works. But then, there's the propaganda. Every character is constantly reminding you that you're working for THE GOOD GUYS™ while the other factions are THE BAD GUYS™. Obviously, what THE BAD GUYS™ want is to destroy the free world, end democracy and kill a lot of innocent people in the way. Of course that's what they want! That's what real life leaders against American interventionism have always wanted! To kill people! Mindless murderers! How barbaric those third world leaders are, and how great are we, Americans who fight for the freedom of the world! I think I might need to rethink the ratings I gave to all those COD games. I know this isn’t strange considering the Tom Clancy label plastered on the title, but like, it's so blatantly morally corrupt that it becomes genuinely disgusting. It's black or white, no greyscale, no good intentions, no nuance, no nothing, they're just bad because bad.

After the main conflict starts with the takeover of the American embassy in Indonesia by generic third world revolutionary leader in protest of having an American military base in their country (something I also happen to have here where I live, relatively close to my home in fact, and I wish was gone), it is revealed they have stolen smallpox from a cryogenic lab in France to threaten the US with releasing it and then you go to Israel and get betrayed by the Israeli Secret Service and the you go to Indonesia to do a bunch of stuff and then you capture the bad guy and in the last level you kill the other bad guy in an extremely anticlimactic shootout where he dies unceremoniously despite planting a virus-bomb in the L.A. Airport. There, I summarized the 10-hours plot. It is as generic as it sounds. Everything is so anticlimactic that it feels like they forgot what was even the point of all this halfway through and just gave up. I didn't connect to anything I was presented to the point where I really, really did not care about whatever happened to any of these characters or if the entire world blew up.

One of the worst things that can happen to any narrative in general, is having yourself in the situation where you actively think to yourself “I do not care about whatever happens to these people” while playing. And that's the feeling I had during the entire game. I just wanted it to be over. Nothing about it engaged me. It is miserable as a game. It is miserable as a story. And still, someone will compare it to Metal Gear just because it's a stealth game and there's a guy in a sneaking suit or whatever superfluous details. But this is indeed the perfect Metal Gear-like for all the people who entirely missed the point of Metal Gear.