In a bygone age where “See you in Rayman 4!” had yet to morph from an innocuous sequel hook into the cruellest lie since the Trojan Horse, Ubisoft were on a hot streak that few developers can claim to have had. It's not uncommon to scoff at them now, but much of the key talent that brought us so many instant classics of this era are still there, including Chaos Theory’s very own Clint Hocking. The personal touch of developers like him has become harder to parse with Ubi’s exponential growth and shifting priorities, but it’s hard not to retain a bit of goodwill so long as at least some of those who made Chaos Theory are still there, because it’s probably the best stealth game ever made.

Contrary to what one might think, Splinter Cell’s chief influence isn’t a certain other tactical espionage stealth action series, but rather Looking Glass. It’s not hard to imagine why – to this day, Thief has better sound design than any game that isn’t either its own sequel or System Shock 2, but the need for its state of the art reverberation system stemmed out of its first person perspective. If immersion is the name of the game, nothing sells it quite like having to track where enemies are through carefully listening the same way Garrett would, as opposed to having a disembodied floating camera that can see around corners do the work for you. How does Sam’s game measure up to that, given it’s in third person?

The answer is through a different kind of genius. In Chaos Theory, every individual part of Sam’s body is affected by light/darkness independently. You might not initially notice this until you arouse suspicion by peeking his head just a little bit too far out of a crawl space into a brightly lit area, or accidentally position him in such a way that his leg’s poking out from around a corner. Even now, it’s exceedingly rare for dynamic lighting to be anything more than window dressing, and yet Chaos Theory was making full use of its potential gameplay applications when N-Gage ports still existed. It goes further than this, too. Heavily armed enemies can not only light flares, but throw them in the direction they last saw or heard you, while others can flick on a torch that they’ll point at various angles as they follow your tracks. No other stealth game can match the anxiety Chaos Theory instils as you cling to a wall and hope that the guard a hair’s breadth away doesn’t turn in your direction while he's holding a light.

It’s important to note that despite its influences, Chaos Theory isn’t an immersive sim ᵃⁿᵈ ⁿᵒ ᴴᶦᵗᵐᵃⁿ, ᴹᴳˢ⁵ ᵃⁿᵈ ᴮʳᵉᵃᵗʰ ᵒᶠ ᵗʰᵉ ᵂᶦˡᵈ ᵃʳᵉⁿ'ᵗ ᵉᶦᵗʰᵉʳ ᵇᵘᵗ ᵗʰᵃᵗ'ˢ ᵇᵉˢᶦᵈᵉˢ ᵗʰᵉ ᵖᵒᶦⁿᵗ. It instead opts for a middle ground between their emergent problem solving and its own predecessors’ affinity for pre-baked scripted set pieces. This may sound eclectic on paper, but it works remarkably well in terms of pacing. Relax one moment as you clamber up and down several floors of an office block in any order and through whatever means you please, but be ready the next when you have to switch the power back on and quickly scramble out of the now gleaming room as a squad of guards floods in. Granted, there’s a slight degree of inconsistency in this respect. The bank level’s famously bursting with alternate pathways to accommodate more play styles than you can shake a stick at, while the end of the bathhouse level could drive even an actual Third Echelon agent to forsake his non-lethal playthrough, but this balancing of peaks and valleys overall allows for lots of creative, freeform solutions while still ensuring that there’ll always be segments which demand your attention even on repeat playthroughs.

The fact that Chaos Theory manages to stay so engaging from start to finish without giving you any new equipment along the way is a testament to this, but other areas of the game deserve as much attention as its level design. For instance, no matter how many people are aware of how much Amon Tobin outdid himself with this game’s music, it’s still not enough. This series of chords is Splinter Cell, as much as thick shadows and green goggles, and if it were distilled into a person they would assuredly be skulking about in the dark. The extra instrumentation which dynamically fades in and out according to enemies’ alertness level (my favourite example being this absolute tune) not only drives home his talent even further, but also acts as another way to communicate important information to the player if the increasingly copious sandbag checkpoints throughout the level hadn’t already clued you in. To put things in perspective, this may be the only example of Jesper Kyd’s involvement in a soundtrack not being the highlight.

Chaos Theory’s also a beneficiary of the time when different ports of one game would have exclusive features for no particular reason. I can’t speak for how it controls on console, but I can say that adjusting Sam’s movement speed with the mouse wheel is a fantastic alternative to the standard method of protagonists instantly becoming silent as soon as they crouch (to my surprise, it doesn’t work that way in real life). Combine it with a camera that gently shifts about to give you the best possible view depending on which direction Sam is moving in and the game feels like a dream to control. On PC you also have the added benefit of being able to toggle whether enemies speak in their native languages, a bit akin to Crysis’ hardest difficulty, which despite being such a minor feature seems like a really underutilised concept.

I’d be remiss not to mention the writing as well. While it’s fair to say that Chaos Theory probably isn’t a game you’d play for the story itself, it’s equally true that it wouldn’t be so beloved if its characters weren’t so charming, including the guards, whose responses to being interrogated are not just genuinely funny but also a glaring counterpoint to the notion that this series takes itself too seriously. Few voice actors understand their characters as well as Michael Ironside gets Sam Fisher. Every delivery of his is golden, whether grumbling in response to his support team constantly bullying him for being old or in the plot’s more cathartic moments. Given both that Ironside has now dabbed on cancer a second time and his recent-ish reprisals of the role in the form of Ghost Recon DLCs, one can only hope they get him to work his magic again in the first game’s upcoming remake.

Regardless of how that turns out, it’s nice to know that Splinter Cell has some kind of future again. Bringing back something old can have just as much value as creating something new, and while asking it to be as good as Chaos Theory is probably a tall order, all it really needs to do is be good enough to prove that pure stealth games still have a place in the mainstream. Sam has saved us from WW3 several times over by now, so hopefully he can also save his genre from the plague of waist-high grass.

Hedging my bets on this one – see you in Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell® (TBD)!

Reviewed on Aug 07, 2022


4 Comments


1 year ago

Excellent review!
Cheers! Thanks for reading.
I love the bookends of this review lmao
Thanks Astroboy. Given that the remake's director left Ubisoft a couple of months after I wrote this up, I feel as if I've accidentally channeled the spirit of Murfy and cursed this series as well.