Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow
When I read the title "Pandora Tomorrow" I immediately thought about "Mission Impossible 2". I was right, the plot is about a villain who wants to take revenge on the american government by means of unleashing the pox virus.
This game improves upon the first in multiple areas. The level design now makes it clearer that you can take more than one approach in each section. Different approaches in the previous game were there, but the level design didn't incentive it. There is a much better integration between the gadgets, skills and level design in the second game. Now we have levels designed for climbing, night vision, heat vision, lock picking and the snake camera.
From all the levels I'd highlight Jerusalem as the best for me. It has local music, people chatting and you don't have any guns or gadgets. You really have to play stealth and this creates tension in a way that rivals the best terror games. It's incredible how they managed to create a living city with so much hardware limitations of the time. You see one or two NPCs walking on the streets, yet you can clearly feel that there are more people inside the houses. To put on perspective, in Bioshock Infinite, when you go to the parallel dimension where there is a revolution going on. In there you hear gunfire and crowds in the background, but it feels rather strange to keep hearing those after you kill all the enemies.
They've changed some gameplay elements. Medkits are no longer an item to carry with you. Now you have stations to heal located in specific points at each level. For me it doesn't hurt because in this game almost every time you require health it's after some combat and this is where they placed the stations anyways. However, I did miss the puzzles with heat vision to discover passwords for doors in the previous game.
This should be a game design lesson. When you don't explain it to the player, he or she will most certainly miss it. In the first game the heat vision can detect land mines. The game does explain it, but it's contained within a scene of two enemies talking to each other. It's easy to miss it. Not every player pays attention to each line of all dialogues or even the dialogue itself to begin with. To compare, in the original Tomb Raider games they made Lara's mansion a training zone. Most players learn the mechanics during the game's action itself and in Pandora Tomorrow they made exactly this. I did play the training section of the first Splinter Cell, but the real missions is where the player really learns the game's mechanics.
Unfortunately this game is so old that modern systems are going to have trouble, specially because this game was released when 4:3 aspect ratio was the standard.
