Well I have to say that I’m
very impressed with Ubisoft’s work here! I didn’t play the first Splinter Cell (GBA) for more than 10 min after which I found the game pretty frustrating and got bored with it, and who can blame me when the first mission was “Get through a burning inferno”? But believe me - Pandora Tomorrow is
nothing like its predecessor! I actually
enjoyed playing through the Training missions this time (in Splinter Cell this was not only boring but incredibly frustrating as well since Sam could act pretty stupid and didn’t even know how to aim up high!), though I have to admit that I got sceptic at first when I saw that the first part of the training was identical to Splinter Cell and it’s training grounds. Thankfully, it got better after that (no practicing on throwing grenades, yay!).
So far I think that Ubisoft has done a wonderful job on Pandora Tomorrow and I was thrilled to see how they have successfully implemented lockpicking; it’s fun, somewhat exciting and although it may not take
that much brain activity to open a lock (whether it is a door or a safe), they’ve done a fine job with it.
Note: Now that I have tried lockpicking a safe in the game’s predecessor (I did so after writing this whole “review” in Word), I can say that it looks just a tad better in Pandora Tomorrow - but so does the whole game.
I was also glad to see that dragging bodies and forcing people to use the eye-scan are in as well.
There are a lot of other improvements as well; such as the UI (my
god did the HUD look horrible in Splinter Cell or what!?) and Sam not walking like an old man with ailment all the time (i.e. he was sneaking), but upright instead (simply crouch to sneak this time). He can even do a roll on the ground and you begin the game with both the night- and thermal vision modes.
So I’m definitely gonna flash this one and give it a go! Should provide a lot of fun, I hope
I bet more or less everything I’ve said here was part of the game’s predecessor as well - I can’t tell since I never even finished neither the Training nor the first mission... but hey, at least Pandora Tomorrow managed to impress me! So fingers crossed now that I’m about to flash it onto one of my cards.