Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Double Agent

This is simply a bad port of a game made for the XBox 360. SC: Chaos Theory runs flawlessly on my machine at 1680x1050 with all of my settings on high, but I can't play this game with a decent frame rate on any graphical setting. The game has bugs, graphical errors and crashes constantly for many users. The game doesn't even support wide screen.

If I ignore the technical problems with this game and actually get to play it, I am disappointed with the game play itself. I guess the developers thought it would be better if the game didn't have a HUD. Sorry, all you get is a circle that glows yellow if you are spotted by an enemy. There are no shadows just in between; you are either exposed or hidden. The game is a lot brighter than previous ones and the bad guys are losing their eyesight with every Splinter Cell release (some bright areas are completely safe and others will reveal you, have fun figuring out where to walk).

There are big annoying buttons that pop up in the middle of your screen when you can interact with an object. I have not played this game on another platform, and I am not anti-console; but I have always believed games are "dumbed down" for them, and in this case the PC gets the short end of the stick with a garbage port. Ubisoft just wanted quick money and they didn't take the time to make a game worth it for Splinter Cell fans (they didn't even take the time to remove the Xbox 360 instructions from the PC game menus). Stick with the Xbox version and don't give Ubisoft your money unless they release some major patch changes.

What do you do you for the 4th entry in a series as consistently amazing as Splinter Cell? Give it to a developer who will completely destroy it. Want a game as rock solid and bug free as the first three? It's not here. Want the same sweat inducing stealth action? It's gone. Replaced by a convenient piece of technology that glows green when you're in cover (sometimes) and red when you're not (sometimes). Want to reassign some of the control keys like you can in all the other games in this series as well as every other decent video game released in the last 10 years? Impossible. Apparently, sometimes it works to manually edit an .INI file in one of the directories. You'll have to Google this solution though. You won't hear it from Ubisoft.

I used to look at the Ubisoft logo as the sign of a stable, quality game. Not anymore.

Do the research before you buy this game. Even after two patches, the bugs are rampant. And if you haven't played the other 3 games in this series, do yourself a favor and pick them up first.

As most people are aware, Splinter Cell is part of the unique game genre called stealth FPS (First-Person Shooters). Generally, the Splinter Cell games are sharp, detailed, and challenging. Splinter Cell: Double Agent is no exception.

Ubisoft has brought several new features to the Splinter Cell game in this latest edition, including unlockable gadgets (based on mission objectives), factions, flexable mission objectives, and an atmosphere there your choices actually impact the game. Once I was able to get the game running, I am instantly immersed into the exciting and heart-pounding environment.

Ah, but that is the real challenge it seems. It took me several hours and many more visits to various trouble-shooting forums to get the game up and running. Here is a laundry list of problems I have encountered during the first few hours after getting the game:

1. Autoloaded menu bogs down PC to the point where I could not move the mouse. I Ended up finding the Setup.exe file on the DVD and executing the installer directly.

2. Installer has problems with Daemon Tools virtual ROM program. I had to remove Daemon to get SC to complete installation.

3. The main game .exe (pointed to by desktop icon) does not load the game. I end up getting an error stating **Must Check**. To get past this, you need to create a shortcut to the Offline .exe file and append the switch "-ll" to the pathing information in the shortcut. As a side note, the Online (Multiplayer) .exe file loads fine without any changes.

4. Once you are able to load the Offline (solo) game, the intro movie has a tendency to fall into a loop and continuously play. I ended up having to navigate to the movies directory on the program folder and rename the intro movie so it does not load.

5. The ingame save menu is horrible. I cannot seem to be able to rename the saves with unique names, but a location and date stamp as least makes it useable. As a side note, quicksaves appear in the save-game list, but cannot be loaded when reentering a game. Quicksaves only appear to be usable when the "Load Last Save" option is available.

6. Exit movie loop..... at this point, I am usually so frustrated that I just do a hard-reboot.

If Ubisoft had done another 3 or so weeks of development time, this game would be wonderful. I can't help but think that they prioritized the concole versions above the PC version and PC users are the ones suffering because of it. They have release one path for the games, but as far as I can tell, it does little to fixe any of the problems listed above.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 67 reviews  2.3 out of 5 stars