A New Level of Splinter Cell Action

Hopefully like me, you saw the awesome demos of Splinter Cell Conviction last week from E3 and your mouth dropped. Also, hopefully like me you've been following the series since its inception on the Xbox a short eight years ago--which is why you should be excited about the game when it drops this fall. Below, in no particular order you'll find the five best features of Splinter Cell...five.

Reason number one: Goals displayed in/on the environment

Remember how much it sucked to keep going back into your PDA to check what a new goal meant or what that new goal entailed? Not anymore thanks to a handy-dandy Fincher-esque placement of goals in the game environment. In addition to goals, story flashbacks are displayed in the environment, giving the player more information without pulling them out of the gameplay with a cutscene.

Reason number two: Mark and Execute

Splinter Cell used to be a series about stealth, which usually meant sticking to the shadows and creeping SLOWLY up behind an enemy, holding your breath and tapping the A button. If you were successful, you'd grab that enemy and put him in a chokehold and tap a button and execute them with a quick snap of the neck. This was well and good, but it slowed the gameplay down A LOT; Conviction shuffles the deck and allows players to mark any number of enemies or environmental objects (light bulbs anyone?) and tap a button to take them all out in quick succession. This could be as great as the combat knife from Chaos Theory.

Reason number three: Interrogations

The first thing you will notice in the gameplay trailer below from the Microsoft press conference is just how brutal interrogations are now. In the past Sam would ever so gently slip an arm around an enemies neck and twist the wrist of an enemy to get the info he wanted. Not anymore. Sam is completely unhinged--slamming heads into walls and sinks are par for the course in Conviction and it looks awesome. The opening scene of demo takes place in a bathroom, is this a cue back to when players interrogated a Russian thug in the first game who was peeing in the corner of a car park? Maybe.

Reason number four: Now you see me, now you don't

Faking out your enemies by appearing ever so briefly so you can flank them by yourself is awesome and cracks the possibilities for tactics and different routes of entry into a room wide open. Remember in Duke Nukem 3D when you could project a HoloDuke to draw fire? This is ten times better than that.

Reason number five:Sam isn't a crazy hobo anymore

When gameplay footage first surfaced back in '07 that showed Sam looking like little more than one of the random crackheads surrounding the LACC, I had my doubts. The Splinter Cell series had always been about bleeding edge graphics and immersive gameplay and the trailer above was indicative of neither. Thank God the good folks at Ubi Montreal knew that that wasn't the right path for Sam Fisher and pulled him back into the shadows for a few years. Now, Conviction can't come soon enough.

Splinter Cell Conviction releases this fall exclusively on Xbox 360 and PC