Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow : Games : Web Wombat

It's amazing when you think about it. A few short years ago, the world was assured that Sony's second-generation Playstation would dominate the market for the foreseeable future.

Again, only a handful of years ago, the world was almost equally assured that this Xbox thing would fade into obscurity as yet another marketing gimmick from the greedy warmongers at Microsoft.

Boys and girls, the shoe is on the other foot as of now.

Pandora Tomorrow is the quintessential stealth-em-up and by it all newcomers have been and will be measured (or at least, until Metal Gear Solid 3).

Unfortunately, PT has not survived the difficult and danger-frought passage to Playstation entirely intact.

Story line wise, it's all good - as it should be - with super-fly Sam Fisher and his amazing five o'clock shadow saving America from a crazy Indonesian warlord…but in many ways Pandora Tomorrow is a mere shadow of its former self. Bluntly put, it's mediocre and for a couple of very sad reasons, namely the aging PS2 and the many compromises that have been made in the name of getting Splinter Cell to function with any kind of fluidity.

Visually, Ubisoft has not been particularly successful in attempting to keep the look and feel of Pandora Tomorrow cross-platform and nowhere is this more apparent than in the frame-rate, which varies between average and atrocious, and the number/placement of enemy AI (fewer and further between). Indeed, turning on night-vision is tantamount to boarding a plane bound for Lag City, Population: You.

It's worth mentioning also that almost every level in Pandora Tomorrow has been remodelled, altered or simplified in some way and every curved surface has been removed (since the PS2 is incapable of handling Bezier curves, which a large portion of Splinter Cell 2's geometry is made up of).

This is not to say that Pandora Tomorrow is necessarily a bad game on the PS2. The gameplay is still brilliant (see our Pandora Tomorrow Xbox review for more detail) and in a few ways has been improved by the changed placement of items and the occasional map alteration, not to mention an extremely impressive and entirely new Indonesian Jungle level, but technical faults let the game down in the areas that count.

We weren't exactly
"blown away"
by the framerate

Indeed, the most crucial element of the game, the flow, is ruined by a checkpoint-save system that pops up after, roughly, every two hundred feet asking you if you wish to save your game to the memory card, quite obviously a cheap work-around for the fact that, where the Xbox has a hard-drive, the PS2 has a flimsy 8MB memory card and caches like…like something that caches really slowly.

So I come now to the thing which saves Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow on the Playstation 2 from being cast into the Abyss forevermore: multiplayer.

Say what you like about the lack of a good online client like Xbox Live, multiplayer Splinter Cell is a rush. I mean, there's only one thing better than an über-spy and that's a barrelful of über-spies. Mixed with gun-toting mercenaries, of course.

In the end, we play console games to avoid the crappy framerate issues and hardware troubles of the PC. The Xbox is a viable platform for good games, as is the PS2, but attempting to mix the two appears to be a definite no-no in all but a few cases (Mashed is one of them).

After all, companies design games on the Xbox expecting to not have to scale their work down for a lower-end system, since there is only one Xbox and the hardware is always the same. Having a team of outside programmers come in and kick seven shades of smelly brown stuff out of a game to get it to work with the PS2 seems a tad suss to this reviewer but then, that's just me.

If you don't have an Xbox but don't want to miss out on the best thing since sliced bread, then this port of Pandora Tomorrow is a reasonable compromise and, provided you can take some lost frames and the consistent checkpoints in your stride, you should have fun.

On the other hand, those with an Xbox should really stay clear, since there's no reason to have this in your collection, unless, of course, you're a Sam Fisher groupie, in which case you should seek help. Soon.

Game: Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow
System: PS2
Players: 1-multi
Online: Yes
Developer: Ubisoft Shanghai
Distributor: Ubisoft

Rating: 70%

(Ratings Key/Explanation)

Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow is on the shelves now.

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