Sam Fisher is different nowadays. His gruff voice has smoothed, and he's not always keen to stick to the shadows. Sam isn't worse for the wear, but he isn't always the man you remember. Nor, for that matter, is Splinter Cell.
The boilerplate story focuses on a group of terrorists seeking to annihilate a series of targets in the United States, though the overfamiliarity of the setup is frequently trumped by tense story beats that rival those of any good political thriller. A confrontation between Sam and a colleague signals an overall increase in narrative tension, and the real-world locales you sneak through communicate the high stakes by the very nature of their political importance. Returning operations manager Anna Grimsdottir rattles off technospeak at a faster clip, resident hacker Charlie Cole gets even more annoyingly precocious and hyper, and the secretive Fourth Echelon team grows more and more desperate as the finale draws near. This isn't a story about Sam, but rather, a story about surreptitious warfare. Information is power.
Perhaps it's appropriate, then, that Sam Fisher's presence isn't as commanding as it's been in the past, in part due to the replacement of longtime Fisher actor Michael Ironside. New actor Eric Johnson does a creditable job as Sam, though he doesn't possess Ironside's gravel-throated urgency. Nevertheless, the entire cast effectively communicates Fourth Echelon's calm-under-fire efficiency, as does Blacklist in general. Snazzy digital displays and computer terminals fill out the group's airborne headquarters, the Paladin, and each mission begins with the camera rotating into position above the base's main map before zooming into it. It's a fitting transition into a gadget-filled escapade across a dreary rain-drenched rooftop, or through a heavily guarded trainyard.
You need to get used to Sam's new digs; everything you do in Blacklist is performed there, from upgrading your gear to initiating multiplayer. Rather than accessing menus, you explore the aircraft and speak to your comrades, making the Paladin as much your interface as it is Sam's. The entire scheme feels unnecessarily convoluted and disjointed at first, and the game doesn't do a very good job of introducing you to its structure, though curiosity (and a bit of trial and error) should get you up to speed. But the player-as-Sam logic soon clicks into place, giving even the stand-alone cooperative missions context within Blacklist's fiction, rather than treating them as distinct and unrelated tasks.
However, Blacklist doesn't feel much like Chaos Theory and its ilk, even when it's giving you the tools to be the silent type. Actually, it often urges you to be silent, instantly failing the mission if you're caught, or pitting you against heavily armored guards that are best dispatched from the shadows or circumvented entirely. But if you aspire to action-hero heights, look no further than the invigorating mark-and-execute feature, which lets you tag enemies and then execute them in a slow-motion flourish with a tap of a button. Now you can pull off such maneuvers on the run, taking down enemies with close-quarters kills (or perhaps dealing a headshot) and firing a bullet into a few other nearby skulls, or even snapping a neck or two if your targets are a hair's width from you.
One such device is a drone that you remotely pilot, marking terrorists and taking them down with a dart. Other gadgets are familiar ones: sticky cameras, remote noisemakers, and so forth. The most interesting situations encourage experimentation, giving you a reason to try out your gadgets and guns, testing the limits of the AI, which often (but not always) displays real smarts. A patrolling guard might remark on how a previously closed door is now open and come to investigate, or quickly pirouette as he passes a darkened cubbyhole that could serve as a predator's prime hiding spot. Keeping a vulnerable Sam out of harm's way in these scenarios is enjoyably tense, though some missions are easy to accomplish on medium difficulty. On harder difficulty levels, most missions are arduous and gripping, and two episodes--one in which you must work under a time limit, and one in which you tail an unlikely ally--crank up the drama even further.
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