Stealth games seemed to have had their day in the sun (or, rather, the shadows). Many stealth games have gone a long way to become more action-packed, trading some of its soul to appease a wider audience. It's not hard to blame developers for trying to expand their base and appeal to a wider market. Video games are a business, after all. Still, there's something to be said about earlier stealth games. Not for everyone, but if you are someone who enjoys gameplay built around patience and observance, Splinter Cell is one of the premiere titles.
The original Splinter Cell certainly requires patience. Sticking to the shadows and avoiding confrontation is the key to success. Most of your ammunition is likely to go towards taking out lights rather than taking out guards. In classic spy fashion, you get a multitude of neat gadgets to aid you, and not many of them are lethal. You'll use optic cables to see behind doors, or sticky cameras to see around corners, or smoke grenades to distract enemies. Few games make you feel more like a super awesome super secret special forces agent, never mind one of the coolest and most badass in Sam Fisher (portrayed by the always excellent Michael Ironside, whose voice became so iconic that it created a bit of a hullabaloo when it was announced he wouldn't return to voice the character in Black List).
Let's just talk about Sam Fisher for a second as well. On the surface, he's your stereotypical military shooter character. Fit and grizzled white dude who kills people for a living without second thought and is capable of everything from picking locks to defusing mines to supporting himself between two walls by doing the splits. Except when you really break it down, he isn't really your typical action hero. For starters, he's on the older side. At the time of the first game's release, Fisher was supposed to be 45 years old. On top of that, almost every cutscene reveals that the only thing he truly cares about is his daughter. He's constantly trying to get in touch with her while he's deployed. He even mentions her in the field at times, because he's eager to get back and call her. What's also interesting about Fisher is that he always seems a bit more annoyed during a mission. Most action heroes take a weird pleasure in their line of work (think Nathan Drake or literally anyone from Call of Duty). Yet Fisher gets annoyed by the politics of the situation. He's intelligent and beyond capable, but he doesn't often seem to really enjoy the work. Instead, he seems to simply recognize that he's the best there is at what he does, and what he does ain't nice, to quote Wolverine. Yes, he still has a lot of elements typically found in your generic action hero, but Fisher is more compelling than most, even today.
As for the game itself, it's hard to say if it's aged particularly well or not. Modern games don't like to send players down linear corridors. The lack of map space will be a turnoff to newer and younger players who tend to complain about linear level design. Of course, it's important to recognize that this came out in 2002 on clearly outdated technology. Splinter Cell plays a bit more like a puzzle game than a typical stealth game too. A lot of time will be spent sitting in place and watching guards walk around. Players are likely to just observe their pattern, then plan accordingly. It rarely takes a long time to figure it out, but there generally is a simple solution to "solve" each level. The linearity of the levels doesn't hurt the game at all, but it does contribute to it feeling a bit more like puzzles to be solved than a mission to be accomplished.
Additionally, the game isn't very forgiving. While figuring out a solution isn't difficult, executing the plan sometimes is. If you mess up, you could be in for a world of hurt. Since it's a stealth game, shoot outs are discouraged. The game wants you to stick to the shadows and sneak around. Killing people is fine (unless the politics in the story don't allow you to), but you better make sure to hide the bodies after. If not, unseen guards may stumble upon them and sound an alarm. Either way, you need to be pretty careful when you move throughout a level. A missed shot could call the attention of a guard and suddenly the pattern is off. Or you may even shoot or throw something too close and suddenly guards know where you are.
Of course, this makes it extremely frustrating when the game forces you into shoot outs. There are nine missions in total, and there are only two random moments throughout wherein you must get involved in a firefight. This was also true in Black List, but the key difference is that later Splinter Cell games made it a point to work gun play into the game prior to these sections, or distributed these moments evenly throughout the game. In Splinter Cell, it doesn't work like that. Instead, the game is entirely built around the player staying out of shootouts. It wants players to avoid confrontations like that. The difficulty spike throughout a level when you are seen, largely because guards start shooting at you, clearly acts as a deterrent to being noticed. So when you get to those two moments in the game where you aren't given a choice, it becomes extra difficult. It's poor design, frankly. Fisher only takes a few hits before he dies, and your guns aren't powerful or accurate enough for firefights to be particularly smooth or fun. It creates an unnecessarily frustrating scenario, and betrays the very nature of the game, the theme the game is entirely built upon.
Other than that, the game is still fun to play, although its controls are sometimes a bit on the clunkier side. Gamers who grew up in the age of "mark and execute" might even find it borderline unplayable, but it's pretty solid gameplay overall. (Although if you stick with the franchise and go on to play Pandora Tomorrow and Chaos Theory, you can't help but notice how much they iron out over the years.) So the controls aren't exactly the best, and few games from the PS2-era aged well visually, but as an overall game, it's still solid and worth revisiting.
As an aside, I should mention that I re-played Splinter Cell and the first mission of Pandora Tomorrow on the PS3 HD remaster collection. If you have an older copy, just play that. The HD "remaster" is horrendous. First of all, it doesn't even look that much better. In fact, some scenes are straight up worse. The final cutscene in particular was little more than just a serious of blurry images. Secondly, the game play is somehow worse. Your pistol is insanely inaccurate, to the point where you're missing lights while aiming from three feet away. The guards have suddenly become so much more intelligent, which itself wouldn't be a problem until you notice that if you shoot and miss them while their back is turned, all the guards in the area know exactly where you are. Even worse, it's next to impossible to sneak up on them. Seriously, the number of occasions my footsteps "alerted" the guards despite literally not being able to move any slower was extraordinarily frustrating.
Then there's the issue of frequent freezes. I never had one so bad that I needed to reset my console, but it came close a few times. And while I never had much of a frame rate problem with Splinter Cell, I had to completely give up on Pandora Tomorrow because it got so bad so as to become unplayable. All of this on top of the weird audio and visual bugs. It's hard to imagine anyone put in any actual work on these remasters, which is a shame because if any franchise deserves a remaster (apart from Battlefront), it's Splinter Cell. Supposedly Chaos Theory is actually well done, though they remove the insanely fun multiplayer modes for some reason, but I haven't tried it.
As I move onto Pandora Tomorrow, I'm abandoning the HD remaster and returning to my PS2 copy, because that is weirdly superior...
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