Thursday 4-Mar-2004 4:32 PM The magnificent Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow's online multiplayer mode blown wide open The original Splinter Cell was a barnstorming exercise in sneak-based terrorist-thwartation which alternately inspired joy, frustration, out and out rage and all points between. Still, even its most outspoken detractors would have to concede it sure did look mighty pretty.
Splinter Cell Pandora manages to top the original for looks - no mean feat - while our single-player hands-on (see here) left us convinced that the gameplay had been honed to near-perfection. Single-player gameplay that is. Today, we get to grips with the multiplayer online mode...
We had the luck to play against a couple of Ubisoft employees, and never have we witnessed a more calculating company of sneaks and villains. There's a maximum of four players in a game, a minimum of two, and the action is an at first curious hybrid of first- and third-person action.
There are separate teams for players to choose from; you can play as a "Shadownet" operative (a good guy), who moves around in the third-person stealth-based style of the single-player game, or else a Mercenary, who takes the traditional online first-person mode.
Choose to play as a merc and the game feels very much like an FPS: you hunt down the Shadownets with the solitary aim of blasting them into kingdom come. The Shadows are equipped only with electric stun guns that are good only for stunning your opponent momentarily.
If you want to take a merc out for good, you'll need to creep up on one and snap his neck, which isn't easy, as we unhappily demonstrated when we attempted to creep up on one of the Ubisoft team and instead found her riddling us with bullets whilst cackling over the headset like a woman possessed.
There are three types of mission: Neutralisation, Sabotage and Extraction; in Neutralisation you need to hack into security systems, disarming weaponry and attempting to avoid detection.
The Extraction Mode is essentially a Capture The Flag-style affair, where the 'nets need to collect chemical rods in place of a flag (and the mercs need to grab them back again). Then there's sabotage, another CTF variant where the 'nets need to sneak into enemy territory and plant a modem.
Neutralisation, on the other hand, requires you to hack into various computer terminals in the enemy's base. Trouble is that you're exceedingly vulnerable to enemy fire while hacking into a terminal and you show up on the mercs' radar - useful to have a point-man accompanying you, then.
All of which, if we're entirely honest, is an excuse to go gallivanting around a series of eight sizeable maps re-enacting some kind of hideously addictive Spy Vs Spy caper. There's a radar of sorts that only kicks into play at certain moments, say when a 'net triggers an alarm or wanders unwittingly into the field of a surveillance camera.
There's plenty of other nifty touches to be aware of too; mercs wear helmets, so if you shoot at a fire extinguisher you'll get foam all over their goggles. It's a similar effect to the misting up of Samus's visor in Metroid Prime, except here it temporarily impedes your opponent (or you), rather than just looking nice.
There are a number of weapons for each side to take advantage of: 'nets can use smoke grenades, flashbangs, chaff grenades and even sticky cameras that can be used to emit toxic gas, while you can also shoot the mercs with a special bullet that will mean they always appear on your radar.
The mercs themselves can take you out with frag grenades, proximity mines, or phospho grenades that mark the 'nets with luminous particles meaning they can be easily seen, as well as more workaday flares (lights) and even a tazer.
This is maybe the most compulsive spy-themed multiplayer fun we've had since GoldenEye on N64; as you'd hope, there are a number of parameters to mess with so you can handicap good players, give yourself more lives to play with, etc.
The brilliant lighting system of the single-player game remains, so you can shoot out lights and wait for your foe in pitch darkness (although both players have a variety of useful vision modes to rely on, whilst mercs also have a torch to fall back on.)
As producer Domitille Doat put it to us: "When we decided to do the multiplayer mode, we really wanted to do it in a completely different way, an unexpected way.
"The idea of saying we're going to have FPS meets action stealth; the required a lot of work to balance the gameplay; it was hard for us to get, but we think we've succeeded in coming up with maps where both the spys and the mercenaries can enjoy each other as much as possible."
Levels include a museum, a cinema, and a hospital, and each one is littered with fences to climb, tunnels to crawl through, rooms in which to secrete yourself and innocent looking areas in which to set up traps of such dastardly proportions that even Muttley would be struck dumb.
The various different states of visibility, the potential control over your environment, the scope for frenetic, thought-free action or chess-with-extreme-violence style strategy - superb.
There's an incredible amount of depth to the multiplayer game, and it's just a shame that those of us without Xbox Live won't be able to sample the delights on offer here; if you do have Live, from the evidence we've seen here you could conceivably while away the next six months hunting down your online chums on here without growing bored.
There's such freedom to try different tactics; essentially this is the best game of hide and seek featuring proximity mines we've ever had the pleasure to turn our hand to. Tomorrow can't come soon enough...
The frankly ace Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow is released on Xbox on March 26, with a PC version to follow soon afterwards and GameCube and PS2 versions scheduled for June.
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