Instead of heading through a front door, I’d climb through a window and pull a guy out instead of awkwardly defeating a room full of soldiers using Nathan Drake-esque stop-and-pop tactics, I’d hang from the ceiling, crush them using environmental hazards, and actually think about who I should mark for execution. I cranked the difficulty up to “realistic,” and tried again.Ībout half of that playthrough still resulted in really, really dumb decisions (note to self: don’t bother throwing an EMP grenade when there’s nothing electronic around to disrupt), but occasionally, and quite suddenly, I’d become the exact sort of player Conviction wanted me to be. I survived through a normal-difficulty playthrough like this, but I couldn’t shake that feeling I’d grown so accustomed to over the course of the Splinter Cell series: that I was doing everything wrong, and ruining the experience through my own stupidity. I’d mark the wrong guys, awkwardly sprint toward a guy with the intention of melee-killing him after he’d already started firing at me, and generally act like the exact sort of idiot that the game didn’t want me to be. My first playthrough of the Conviction demo saw me acting like a complete idiot. Today’s demo answered some, but not all, of those questions. Would it be a stealth game? A tactical third-person shooter? An unholy, potentially incredible combination of all these things? Metal Gear Solid is forgiving to the point of laughability on anything but the hardest settings previous Splinter Cell games have been so high-consequence that single mistakes can force you to restart entire missions.Īfter Arkham Asylum renewed my faith in the stealth genre, I was desperate to see what Conviction could bring to the table. I’ve always loved stealth games in theory, but even the genre’s best entries like Metal Gear Solid or Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory fall too heavily on one side of the difficulty spectrum. Splinter Cell: Conviction is my most anticipated game of 2010.