What The Hell Happened To The Stealth Genre?!

Sneaking Through Tombs And Uncharted Lands

Whilst stealth was doing its thing at the start of the century, action games were evolving (and then rapidly devolving) into cover-based shooters. You can thank Gears of War for that. Yet even that grew stale and repetitive quite quickly, so something had to change.

Enter the "action game with stealth bits" genre.

The next decade saw the likes of the Uncharted franchise, the Tomb Raider reboot and just about every game in-between incorporate some vague attempt at stealth into it. You know what I mean, the arbitrary "hide in the long grass/hedge and pick off conveniently placed enemies" sections that became formulaic after a fashion.

Or worse still, the obligatory-stealth-section in a game. Hands up, who enjoyed getting insta-killed every time you flubbed a takedown in The Order 1886? Who can honestly say the MJ/Miles Morales parts of Marvel's Spider-Man were always worth replaying? Exactly, no one.

It also didn't help that long established stealth veterans were favouring a more action-based angle. Splinter Cell: Conviction ditched a lot of its trademark sneaky sneaky for a more gung-ho Fisher, which was an unwelcome shift. And as for Hitman: Absolution, well... let's just not go down that road.

For a time, it started to seem like things weren't looking great for the genre. The slow and methodical school of stealth seemed to getting sidelined. Stealth was becoming more of a byline in action games, a companion piece rather than a fully-fleshed gameplay tenet. Was the old school in danger of being relegated...?