It's important to note that this game has practically nothing to do with the original Shivers game, so any hopes for returning characters or what have you is pretty much out the window immediately. That being said, I really loved playing this game, even if I'm terrible at the puzzles. Not all the puzzles are great, of course, since they're mostly bizarre logic puzzles that the main villain set up to test you. Honestly, I feel like for the level of importance these totems have and the kind of supposed threat we're facing, you'd think you'd be getting tests that are far more intense than just sitting there rolling an egg a set number of spaces so it'll drop down a hole safely without breaking. The back story is probably the most interesting part of this game, as you're witnessing an entire town of backstabbing dirt-bags try to get one over each other, as innocent people get killed. The motivation for the villain is pretty solid for doing all this, though the amount of time and effort being put into his plot to destroy this small little down in the middle of sunbaked Arizona is probably a little over dramatic. Also, the villain's costume is kind of silly, even with the altered voice. The best part of the game is probably the music by the fictional band Trip Cyclone (a very cheesy 90's band name, yeah). The music itself is pretty great in general, adding to the mood of the game. Some places feel rather tense thanks to it. As an aside, some of the music videos shown in the game are actually meant to be clues to solve certain puzzles. The physical game actually had a music CD that came with it, which I enjoyed listening to a great deal as a kid. The fact they added in a 360-degree panoramic view for navigation was neat -at the time-, but the novelty of wears of pretty quickly. Graphically, the renders are a decent upgrade, and the attempt to have animated elements in the background can add a creepy effect. 4 out of 5 for quality/nostalgia.
It's sad to see the franchise end on this note, since it wasn't exactly a strong entry. Suffering a lot from graphical enhancements bottle-necking design to fit a rather short, narrow game with linear levels, rather than returning to the formula that made Guerrilla such a stand-out classic. Basically, it looks prettier, but it feels much smaller. The story, which attempts to be dramatic in the phase of it's brevity, suffers from it, too. I suppose it's WAAYY too easy to compare it to Guerrilla, since expectations were fairly high riding on the open-world aspect of that game, but since the company behind it, Volition, has made a killing on such open worlds. The gameplay itself is solid enough, at least, and where they didn't exactly have a lot of room to make a large-expansive game, they honed the physics-focused gameplay to a high-quality of polish. The experimental weapons, including the Nano Forge tool, are all fun to mess around with, for sure! If anything, the gameplay shines through despite the shortcomings around the rest of the game. As far as narrative goes, it's laughable. At the time, the GoW games were still in full swing, so you get the feeling that, even if unintentional, the story suffers from taking from those games' story beats. It really does not give you a reason to care about characters, even if some come off as likable by accident. The ending is just ... so... face-palming-ly stupid. It doesn't take any real thought to recognize the problem just from the beginning. I'd say if you're someone who can ignore the story enough to enjoy the game, then you'll probably enjoy it. If you're like me and couldn't ignore it, then I'd probably either get it on the cheap at the very least.
I remember sneaking out of my room at night to sneak into my Father's office to play the Journeyman Project Turbo way back when. Those days were full of trying to figure out and map ALL the areas, and attempting to complete the puzzles that would at times boggle my young brain. The series as a whole deserves to be remembered. When I saw this version in a gaming magazine, when it was targeted for the first Playstation and Macintosh back then, I was hopeful we'd see a PC release of it some day. Twenty-some years later, my wish is fulfilled. The port is overall functional, too! There was a point in college where a group of friends attempted to bring it to life in the Source Engine, and any research they had to do by playing the game required emulating the MacOS on a PC, which wasn't ideal. If only we had this version back then,... man. However, if I had to choose between this version and Turbo... I might have stuck with Turbo for "certain" things. Where there was a simple but concise block of text in a pop-up window with a light and a small alarm, there is now a bland, blue-faced AI reading information at you like the script is dangling in front of her face. She's ARHTUR Alpha Vers. 0.4, and they haven't even begun to program a good personality for her to make her less annoying or boring to listen to. If I could skip her dialogue, I would. Speaking of skipping things, while the pre-rendered canned cinematics to move through an environment were a fun way to make you "feel" like you were playing a game with real 3D graphics at ultra-hi fidelity (for the timeee ... ), these days I'd appreciate a "zip mode" like Riven has to skip through some of these lengthy point-to-point walking sequences, or any sequence. Just a thought ... Acting is about as cheesy in this game as can be expected, but I can get past it, since this was the "garage band" era of games. You got what you could get... Like I said, it's Great, but I think it could have been better ...
Where Thief invented the stealth genre, with it's dark corners and tense situations as you skulk about castles and dungeons, Splinter Cell took it to a new level with a 3rd person perspective, and a world-hopping conspiracy, bringing it to the forefront with innovative character movement and allowing for low-light and heat vision to identify threats in the dark and low-visibility areas. The game centers around a new branch of the NSA code named Third Echelon, where you play as Sam Fisher, an experience and grizzled agent brought in to solve a problem that threatens the US. As Sam Fisher, you delve deep into enemy territory, using the shadows to slink your way past enemies, using high-tech weaponry to keep the silence around your presence in military bases, Chinese streets, and European suburbs. As a game that helped refresh and redefine a genre, this stealth-action game is a true classic, rewarding stealth tactics and guerrilla style approaches to problems. I highly recommend this if you love silent take-downs and listening to Michael Ironside talking aggressively.
