Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Blacklist

My go-to benchmark for whether a stealth game actually respects player agency is whether you can complete it three completely different ways and have all three feel intentional. Blacklist passes that test. The Ghost, Panther, and Assault scoring tiers are not just cosmetic labels slapped on a linear campaign. Ghost demands you stay invisible and non-lethal, Panther rewards stealth kills and gadget use, and Assault lets you treat Sam Fisher like a Tier 1 operator who skipped the briefing. The scoring system means every mission replay has a goal, which is smarter design than it sounds. The movement and gadget toolkit is genuinely deep for a 2013 release. Sam can flow in and out of cover, scale pipes, shoot out lights, feed snake cameras under doors, and tag targets with sonar goggles once upgraded. The loadout customisation runs through a hub called the Paladin, a mobile HQ jet that also houses side missions tied to your crew members. Charlie's assignments lean toward wave survival, Grim's focus on pure stealth runs, and most of them support solo or co-op play. That adds up to a serious volume of content sitting outside the main campaign. The Paladin is basically Sam Fisher's version of the Normandy, and the gear upgrade loop is legitimately satisfying rather than padding. Where the single-player stumbles is level design. The environments, while visually impressive and strong on lighting, tend to funnel you. Climbable pipes appear exactly where you need them, armoured guards stand inconveniently in predictable spots, and on normal difficulty the gadget suite feels more optional than the game wants to believe. Bump it to Realistic or Perfectionist, though, and the game correctly strips away the mark-and-execute safety net and tightens supply caches, which forces actual engagement with the tools at hand. The story is a functional Tom Clancy plot, competent but unremarkable. The one genuinely contentious thing: Michael Ironside did not return to voice Fisher. His replacement Eric Johnson does a capable job but Fisher sounds noticeably younger, which the game never quite reconciles. Now for the multiplayer honesty check, because this is where buying Blacklist in 2025 gets complicated. Spies vs. Mercs is, conceptually, one of the smartest asymmetric multiplayer designs in the genre. Four spies with third-person movement and stealth tools hacking terminals, four first-person mercenaries hunting them down in near-darkness. The Classic mode is tense, skill-dependent, and nothing else on PC does quite the same thing. The problem is the player pool. Official servers are long gone. Community workarounds exist but are inconsistent. If you can organise your own group, Spies vs. Mercs Classic mode is still worth the effort. Walking into public matchmaking in 2025 expecting a healthy ranked scene is not a reasonable expectation. The co-op side missions, however, are fully playable offline or with a friend and hold up well as structured mission content. For a shooter-adjacent audience, Blacklist sits closer to a tactical third-person game than a run-and-gun. The time-to-kill on Assault difficulty is low and the animations are context-sensitive and brutal, but this was never built to compete with a movement shooter. It was built for players who want to read a room before entering it. On PC, the game holds up visually at higher resolutions and the mouse and keyboard controls are clean for the stealth traversal. If you are buying this primarily for the campaign and co-op, the value case is straightforward. If you are buying it for Spies vs. Mercs matchmaking, set your expectations accordingly before checkout. Fred, Scout Team