Rather, darkness acts as a superhero cape, empowering as it gives you, the unseen, deadly power over them, the seen. No longer is the game about laying traps in the dark and hiding in wait. Now on the run, Fisher has no access to the raft of gadgetry once provided by former employer Third Echelon, the lack of night vision goggles placing new emphasis on movement and blunt power (and eliminating the dull green wash that characterised the visuals of the earlier games). Where once Splinter Cell was the primary preserve of the patiently cruel - those players happy to memorise enemy patrol patterns, lay elaborate traps and find thrill in the crumple of a single adversary - Conviction invites Jack Bauer into its lead role, then dresses him up like a ninja. There are still echoes of the series' tradition of planning and executing skulk attacks, but new-found pace and accessibility makes this more of an action game than ever before. Fisher has found alacrity in his middle age, his sneaking now less about cowering from torch beams than dashing, Dark Knight-like, from silent takedown to takedown. The answer, it appears, is nothing much like a stealth game at all. We're now three years on from Ubisoft's original release date for Sam Fisher's fifth outing, a development hell seemingly spent groping in the dark for exactly what a stealth game should look and play like, post-Kojima. The irony in calling the reinvention of a long-established series Conviction, only to flip-flop on what exactly that reinvention should look like, is writ large across Splinter Cell's recent history.
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