7. Environments
Blacklist may seem a little dated in the visuals department - in honesty, it doesn't look a whole lot better than Conviction - but the
style of the visuals is excellent, particularly as it pertains to throwing Fisher headlong into a diverse list of locales. The places this game takes you to on its globe-trotting adventure ensures that boredom is a virtual impossibility; if the preview footage shown off at E3 focused too much on dusty streets in broad daylight, the game itself is much more varied; you'll be traversing gigantic government bunkers, vast mansions, the rain-soaked streets of London, and in one exhilarating sequence, a moving train. Much like the Hitman games, much of the novelty of the Splinter Cell series is in sneaking in and out of a variety of unconventional situations undetected; the beauty of the game is in how Ubisoft have nailed that this time. Not one level is too similar to the one that came before it, and given that each of the 12 missions lasts close to an hour, it's impressive that we're immersed in each place for pretty much the entirety.