Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Blacklist

Sam Fisher's final outing is also his most enigmatic

- ANDREI PECHALIN

Given the absence of the Tom long-gestating Clancy's Splinter Cell remake from the latest Ubisoft Forward, our thoughts inevitably return to Sam Fisher's last outing. Over a decade on from its release, Blacklist is a curious artefact a game of puzzling ambiguities. Is it an ingenious satire, delivered with utter commitment to the bit, or one of the most ludicrous narratives ever seen in video games? A successful balance between the undiluted stealth of the original and the Bourne-like action of Conviction, or a fumbled compromise? The slew of side missions and unlockables (many hosted on now-defunct servers - see 'Black Op'), at least, captures a definitive moment of Ubisoft lost to the ages.

Blacklist's narrative premise is almost elegant in its simplicity: the United States is subjected to a series of escalating terrorist attacks that will continue unless it withdraws all its troops from foreign soil.

The scale is global, the demands extreme, the stakes never higher. It explains why Fisher is allowed to jet around in a flying fortress as the head of the newly constituted Fourth Echelon, a crack squad of elite intelligence operatives committing a litany of atrocities across the world in the name of American interests.

While in previous instalments Fisher was careful in his exercise of the so-called Fifth Freedom the right to protect the first four American freedoms at any cost here he cuts a bloody trail through Libya, Iran, Iraq, Mexico, Paraguay, the UK and several US locales. Kidnapping, extortion, torture and aerial drone strikes are all par for the course in order to stop the so-called Engineers' blacklist of attacks.