Hello everyone. I recently beat Splinter Cell Conviction on its highest difficulty and wished to talk about it.
Firstly the game was rather challenging to get running. Fun fact, I first played Conviction on MacOS back when the game first came out because it was the only Splinter Cell game released on MacOS and on the Mac App Store. It was harder for us poor Mac bois because the Apple Magic Mouse didn't have a middle mouse button and you couldn't do a left and right click at the same time. I recall the Mac Port even warned you about this and suggest rebinding ADS to "Option/Alt". Those were wild times.
However, the game is no longer playable on Mac (Intel or Silicon) as the older Ubisoft Launcher no longer runs on Mac and Mac no longer supports 32 bit apps as of MacOS Catalina. In fact, a lot of older Mac Ports from the time like the early Assassin's Creed, Batman Arkham Tomb Raider, Bioshock, GTA and Borderlands games are unplayable now (unless you are a wizard with Wine and Rosetta). I tried running Conviction on my Mac running Linux Mint and no dice. The game and its Ubisoft Launcher didn't play nicely so I had to play this game on an Asus Vivobook Laptop running Windows 11 and the game in Windows 7 Compatibility Mode which still had issues. The game's performance and framerate kept chugging and would crash frequently. As someone who is "a complete baby in the world of PC gaming", I had to do something scary and install my first mod. The Conviction Fusion Mod which eased some of the performance issues and made the crashes a bit less frequent. It was confusing as the mod's instructions said "just extract and throw in the folder where the game executable is". I did literally that but it turns out you have to extract the folder and grab the stuff inside and paste that into executable's location.
This made some improvements. The controls were now closer to Spinter Cell Blacklist. The game was chugging a bit less and it skipped all the introductions when you first boot the game. But the game still crashed every 30-40 minutes. It would freeze for around a minute and then crash to desktop...... sometimes. Other times, pressing Escape would save the game after a minute and unfreeze it. The game's checkpoint system was generally good enough that I never lost a ton of progress and the game loaded pretty fast but it meant I couldn't really play the Deniable Ops missions for fear of losing everything. I imagine that wiser and more experienced PC gamers than me would probably and easily identify and fix these issues in my place but alas.
Back to the game itself, Conviction's highest difficulty, called "Realistic", mostly just tweaks damage, health and detection numbers. Enemies can detect Sam in light in under half a second from pretty far away, and can kill Sam almost as quickly. I also noticed ammo from guns you picked up seemed to be slightly lower though I am unsure of this. Enemy AI also didn't seem to be affected so it doesn't appear that enemies get new moves or tactics on Realistic Difficulty. Now, I have played other shooters from the time on their hardest difficulties like the Uncharted and COD games of the time and noticed I had a lot more fun on Conviction than these games which is what inspired me to write this post.
Lets begin by talking briefly about Uncharted 2 and 3 which released around the same time as Conviction. Uncharted's 3rd person shooting gameplay gives the player quite a few options in combat such as climbing, melee/hand-to-hand, pulling enemies of ledges, swimming, swinging off ropes, taking cover, performing cover takedowns etc. As well as holding one pistol, one 2 handed gun and grenades. Uncharted on its easy and medium difficulties is quite fun as you can run-and-gun throughout the arena using all the cool movement options, alternating between melee and gunplay and brief respites in cover to heal before resuming combat. It's quite fun. I want to shout out that one shipyard gunfight in Uncharted 3. That level and encounter was peak.
However, Uncharted's hardest difficulty, Crushing, makes a lot of those options unviable as you get melted quickly for exiting cover. Gunfights often feel more tedious as you're pinned behind cover, occasionally popping out to do a few quick shots before immediately returning to cover and healing off the damage. You can’t really re-enter stealth or move around as efficiently. In my experience, I found I spend around 90% of an Uncharted crushing firefight waiting behind cover healing off damage, 5% shooting enemies and 5% moving around. Rather than testing my skills, I felt these gunfights were more a test of patience and luck as when I completed them, it was more because I finally got done slowly chipping enemies away from cover. If I had to replay the firefight, I don't feel like I would magically and skillfully complete it again faster.
I bring all this up as a comparison to Conviction as I feel the average gunfight/encounter on Conviction's Realistic Difficulty was more fun the average gunfight/encounter on Uncharted's Crushing difficulty as more of your options were available and there was more of an element of planning at play. Conviction may be the black sheep of the Splinter Cell franchise due to it abandoning a lot of the cool stealth that is synonymous with Splinter Cell in exchange for being a less novel 3rd person action shooter, but at least it was usually a pretty fun shooter as a consolation.
For starters and unlike other SC games, Conviction is generally designed to funnel players into shootouts. Levels are generally quite linear with few alternate paths that let you bypass enemies. Most alternate paths or additions to levels such as pipes you can climb, vents and windows that let you move around etc, function in letting you reposition, break line of sight or flank enemies instead. The earlier levels in Conviction feel a lot more like beta levels for Blacklist as they tend to have a lot more darkness (including light switches and lights you can turn off), pipes to let you get the drop on enemies as well as being a lot wider with more routes. So it's more feasible to use stealth knockouts to clear most if not all enemies in a room. Later levels (especially the White House) are a lot more frugal and spartan with their decorations making firefights a lot more necessary. You also don't have many stealth tools. Sam can't whistle or throw bottles to lure or distract guards. Sticky Cameras are limited and not the best at the role.
I feel the game's cover and shooting mechanics are interesting in this context. The game's default PC controls bind taking cover and rolling to holding Right Click and zooming/ADS as a toggle on the Middle Mouse Button. You can move between pieces of cover by looking at them (indicated by arrows) and pressing SPACE. SPACE also jumps over the piece of cover which did cause some issues. Moving when behind cover is cumbersome. In other shooters, including the game's sequel in Blacklist, when you are behind cover and press up or a direction at the edge of cover, your character will try slightly peeking around it. Conviction has Sam partially move out and position to aim. On Realistic Difficulty, you will get spotted if exposed for around half a second which meant that an unlucky position of the camera resulted in scenarios where the game thought me pressing Left meant I wanted to really peek above cover which got me spotted. This became less common as I became more careful with the camera and moving behind cover but it as an aspect of the game I was never comfortable with.
The game's cover system is mostly functional but lacks additional moves and features from other games from the time (thankfully added by Blacklist). You can't do proper cover or corner takedowns. The game will sometimes recognize you want to do a melee takedown from cover and trigger an animation of you going out and doing the move. But it was finicky so I often had to manually leave cover and try to do it. Enemies during shootouts would throw grenades which would kill you if you were caught in their blast radius and trying to escape from cover while exposed would often be a death sentence. Enemies also tended to rush me when in cover and even trying blind or hip firing often left me exposed.
Sam does have a few moves in combat. He can usually melee kill most enemies or take human shields in close proximity to him but is less reliable in firefights if the enemy is firing at him. Doing a melee move charges up the game's signature "Mark and Execute" feature. You can tag enemies by aiming at them and pressing Q. The amount of tags you can do depend on your currently equipped weapon. weapons like the five-seven pistol can tag up to 4 enemies, While stuff like the SCAR can only tag 2. When you have a "Mark and Execute" charged up, enemies in range will have a red icon above them and pressing E will have Sam instantly headshot all tagged enemies in range.
To the game's credit, the stealth elements work well and play nicely with the combat and cover systems. When you break line of sight, the game displays a silhouette of Sam that indicates his last known position. Enemies will target that location letting you reposition. Sam is mostly invisible in shadows (indicated by the game’s monochrome filter).
As a result of all this, I often felt the game was at its most fun the less you had to shoot. My favourite combat encounters often worked like puzzles where I analyzed the positions of enemies, tagged a few problematic ones, performed melee takedowns on 1 or 2, did a Mark and Execute, ran behind cover or hid somewhere and then dealt with 2 remaining enemies (either by shooting or melee). I remember the combat encounters in the Scientist facility being quite fun because those levels had a ton of enemies but also lots of stuff in the environment I could use like windows to hide and fight. That sense of “cat and mouse” where both me and the enemies were stalking and hunting each other at the same time was fun.
Remember the Uncharted Crushing difficulty section earlier? There, a lot of Uncharted’s movement and combat options were limited on its hardest difficulty. But in Conviction’s Realistic Difficulty, I was moving around and stalking my enemies more than shooting or waiting behind cover. Sam is quite agile and movement is quite fluid so the combination of movement, stealth and gunplay is quite fun. I best felt that contrast during the mission in Conviction set in Iraq where you play as Vic. Vic lacks most of Sam's moveset and even the Mark and Execute Ability as well as having even more limited level design resulting in his level playing like a far more generic 3rd person shooter which highlights just how much better Conviction's core gameplay is.
I will complain that towards the end of the game, the encounters start feeling more repetitive as the game starts lowering your movement and hiding options. For example, in the White House encounters, I remember there is an encounter set in a dining room with a lot of chest high cover but very few windows or pipes to use to climb around. I found myself having to rely more on straight up firefights and chucking grenades to clear out the huge number of enemies.
Interestingly, some of the most fun I had was in the game's side mode: Deniable Ops' Hunter mode. Here you play as a Splinter Cell Agent that goes through various maps and takes out enemies. The game encourages using stealth as getting detected causes reinforcements to come in. These environments tend to have more of that more open level design and hunter-like gameplay I found fun. Even your progression and challenges from the main singleplayer is carried over allowing you to upgrade some of your gear. Unfortunately, I couldn't dive into this mode as deeply as I wanted as the game had a habit of crashing.
I do feel from a purely gameplay perspective, the biggest challenge in recommending Conviction (aside from it being a Splinter Cell game that doesn't focus as much on pure stealth) is that its successor, Blacklist, kinda does everything Conviction does but better and more. Blacklist has a more robust customization and equipment system as well as more open ended levels so even if you wished to play Blacklist like a "Conviction 2", Blacklist gives you more to work with. In addition to the fact that Blacklist better accommodates stealth and ghost playstyles which keeps the gameplay more varied.
Returning to Conviction, I'll briefly mention that the graphics, character models and UI were quite cool and impressive. The story was presented well and had some neat ideas. Ironside's performance as Sam was easily his best so far. You really feel Sam's "tranquil fury" as well as his more weary nature in this game. I also liked how the story kept you guessing with Grim's true alligence. But the actual plot and its events were.... questionable and I'll leave it at that.
In closing, Conviction on its hardest difficulty was a pretty fun shooter with stealth elements (when the game was running well). I'd still recommend Blacklist over it if you want to experience its particular action gameplay (in addition to stealth gameplay).
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