Each Splinter Cell installment seemed to get better for a few years there. The jump from Splinter Cell to Pandora Tomorrow was pretty noticeable and really turned the franchise into something great. Chaos Theory tightens the ship even more, though it's perhaps not as big a leap forward. Still, there are a few additions and some better design elements that do make the third game a tad better.
One of the things Pandora Tomorrow did was expand the routes a player can take. Instead of one very linear level layout, the designers gave players a few options. It was still ultimately Point A to Point B, but they masked it much better by providing a variety of approaches to advance. The same thing is true in Chaos Theory. Here, they also try their hand at a larger map. Players can typically backtrack as much as they want, or go in any direction of the map that they should choose. The map itself can sometimes be difficult to read or figure out, but it's a decent way to make players feel more like they're in an actual area of operations.
All of this is improved by the addition of optional objectives. At the start of each level, Fisher receives mission briefings. You get your critical missions that are built around the story of the game. At times throughout the games, depending on how you approach the levels and what you wind up doing and finding, Fisher may wind up taking on optional side missions from other members of the intelligence team. It's actually a pretty smart addition that really goes a long way, for something so relatively minor. Each mission concludes with a score, which doesn't ultimately make any difference outside of the player's ego and pride. Completing optional objectives increases your score. However, the fact that you may receive mid-level tasks that don't have the benefit of way points on the map when you get them, really spices things up. You'll really wind up feeling like a super spy in the actual field, especially with how big and fluid the maps are. Gone are the days of loading screens mid-mission. You no longer step into a new room only to find the game taking you to that screen while the game loads the next section of the level. Optional missions really gives you more to do during a mission, makes it feel a bit less linear, gives incentive for exploring new areas that aren't directly on the path to your main objective, and at times,, provides a bit of a new challenge to the level.
Each mission begins with a series of briefings from part of the intelligence team, like Lambert, Grimsdottir, or Redding. It feels a bit Metal Gear Solid-inspired, but it doesn't make that much of a difference. In a sort of failed attempt to introduce customization to your character each level, you choose what you want your load out to be. It's rather simplified, however, with the Assault option leaning heavier on ammunition and lethal gadgets, Stealth leaning on less ammo and more non-lethal gadgets, and Redding's Recommendation basically splitting the difference. Sure, depending on how you play and if you care about your score, the balanced load out is actually too balanced and itself discourages using different tactics. You also never really know when you will have to go through the majority of a mission without the benefit of Fifth Freedom rights, so it doesn't make much sense to go with an Assault load out when you might not even be allowed to kill anyone without getting game over.
It would have been nice if they could have figured out a way to connect your mission score to your load out. Maybe higher scores unlock additional gadgets, weapons, or armor. Maybe it unlocked a few add-ons to the guns. Or, maybe higher scores contributed to unlocking more you can equip in a load out. Instead, these are just disjointed elements that don't ultimately feel cohesive and connected; instead give it something of an arcade-like feel.
There's also the addition to the sound meter. In previous games, all you had to worry about was how much light was hitting you. A meter in the corner let you know how visible you were. The higher the marker was on the scale, the more visible you were. The more visible you are, the more likely a guard is to see you. The same thing applies here, except now there's an audio meter as well. It functions the same way: the more noise you make, the higher your noise indicator jumps. The higher it jumps, the more likely a guard is to hear you moving around in the dark. Additionally, there's always a little indicator on the scale to let you know how much ambient noise is in your location. How much leeway you have in noise creation depends on where you are and what's in your environment. In an area with loud machinery? You have more wiggle room. In the dead of night in an office building? Need to keep it down. It's a pretty well-executed addition to the gameplay, and makes sneaking a little trickier. No, it doesn't really make it much harder, but it does give you one more thing to pay attention to when stealthily making your way through levels.
Levels themselves, apart from being more open, also tend to include more civilians as well. They touched a little on this during Pandora Tomorrow, but they expand a bit more in Chaos Theory. Given the political betrayal at the heart of the story, you'll wind up spending a good chunk of time fighting allies like the National Guard or the Japanese defense forces. Thus, you can't really rely on quickly killing targets off in the distant. Certainly, there is no shortage of Fifth Freedom sections, but the game does a better job pushing players down that stealthy track. You often can't just run and gun in the game. You have to become comfortable sneaking and silently taking down enemies with non-lethal means; they way the game is essentially meant to be played. They don't disrupt that with big shootouts, the way the original game sometimes did.
The environments are great, with plenty of ambient noise and light that you can't get rid of. As for the story, well, it's kind of well getting on the tracks of that almost comic book-esque story. The entire game has you hunting down Douglas Shetland, the founder of a private security firm. Shetland, you may recall, was in Pandora Tomorrow, working with Fisher at times. They have a history, so the conclusion is supposed to have some resonance. Meanwhile, a Japanese admiral is seeking to spark a war between North and South Korea as a means to allow Japan to expand their military (something he could have just waited a few years for, really, given the Japanese have the right to do so at this point in time). Between this and Pandora Tomorrow, the more grounded political thrillers of the first game are starting to get a little off the tracks. Still, it could be argued that that makes for a more interesting game. Certainly, it's not a problem in the first three games.
The jump from Splinter Cell to Pandora Tomorrow might have been much greater than the leap from Pandora Tomorrow to Chaos Theory, but there's enough new stuff in the third installment that it does feel like an improvement. Not everything is great. (The SC-20K is back, fully automatic, and has terrible zoom, making it worse to handle and use.) Still, the optional objectives and the more open-ended maps give the game a freshness that they only just scratched in the previous game.
And again, don't buy the Splinter Cell HD Collection. It's buggy as all hell. The audio issues in Chaos Theory are especially annoying given that it's helpful to actually be able to hear the ambient noise around you, not just see the marker. But, if you're like me and get a weird bug wherein a helicopter on the roof sounds like it's right next to you for the entire duration of the mission, that gets a tad trickier. Save yourself some trouble and just try and get the original games.
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