Who knew that playing in the dark could look so good? Apparently, the folks over at Ubisoft sure did. Their latest Tom Clancy hit, Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, follows up the original with new moves, new missions, and a lot more stealth action. The levels themselves offer more open spaces to run and hide, with each mission in a completely different locale. Sometimes, you’ll sneak around in the shadows of city streets, while other times, you’ll creep around in the bushes to protect your cover. I was amazed at the variety of scenery with each new mission. In addition, the player models of this 3rd person shooter are just as spectacular. When you’re farther away from the terrorists, they still appear to carrying on regular actions, like turning their heads, changing their stance, things like that. But when you use your binoculars, you can zoom in on each individual; and up close, they look even more evil. Another cool graphical element in Pandora Tomorrow is the three different ways to view what’s around you. There is the normal view, which has a tendency to be pretty dark at times. But if that’s the case, you can turn on your Night Vision goggles, so everything is in black and white. Or you can use your Infrared shades to see any warm bodies that may be coming your way.

Actors Michael Ironside (I remember him best from Total Recall) and Dennis Haysbert (Fox’s 24) are the lead voice talent in Pandora Tomorrow. The acting itself is very well done, although I thought there seemed to be a few too many pauses during some of their conversations. I’m not sure if that’s just a PlayStation 2 thing or not, but it was unfortunate. The other audio highlight for me was the music, which definitely set the mood for the stealth missions.

For those of you who don’t know, you play as Sam Fisher, the ex-CIA and ex-Navy SEAL who now works for the Third Echelon, and once again has to save the world from a terrorist. That doesn’t sound at all like a Tom Clancy plot, does it? Anyways, the idea with this stealth action thriller is to stay in the shadows to get information, and not get caught. Sure, there will be times when you’re allowed to shoot to kill... just remember to hide those bodies. I had the hardest time in the beginning because I just wanted to covertly pick people off. I quickly found out that wasn’t the right idea in Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow. The bigger challenge is to try and NOT kill anyone, and still pass the missions. Now that is hard. Anyhow, to do all this, Sam Fisher is equipped with a fun bag of goodies, and also has a new array of moves to travel around discreetly. For instance, now you can climb poles, hang from wires upside-down, while playing the role as a sniper (if you so choose to snipe). What’s better than that?

But all of that has to do with the single player mission. Pandora Tomorrow also offers a multiplayer/online mode, which is both new and very cool. If you’re thinking multiplayer like GoldenEye 007 on N64, then you’ll be very disappointed. Instead, the multiplayer/online mode consists of two teams (SHADOWNET and ARGUS), with up to two players on each team. The SHADOWNET Team is a group of spies, while the ARGUS Corporation is a bunch of mercenaries. There are three different game modes to play with: Neutralization, Extraction, and Sabotage. In all three, the SHADOWNET Team must search for the ARGUS Corporation’s viral containers (ND133s), and neutralize them in some way. During the Extraction mode, they must bring them back to a specific extraction point. For all three modes, it is the ARGUS Corporation’s task of eradicating the spies, while protecting the tubes for a certain period of time (or after a number of kills). If you set up a match online, you can customize varying features just to your liking.

Heading into this review, I was a novice with the Splinter Cell series. And while I found Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow to be very difficult, it wasn’t so hard that I didn’t want to play the game. There are only two levels of difficulty: Normal and Hard. Believe me, Normal is no walk in the park. The extent of my missions consisted of plenty of trial and error, which is probably why I liked the amount of checkpoints that were included. However, don’t be confused by this. While there are plenty of checkpoints within Pandora Tomorrow, they vary between the levels. You may have to go through half of your mission before reaching your first checkpoint.

Here’s the bad news, while Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow runs great once it’s up and loaded, you may need to wait a little while for everything to load. That seems to be the case with a lot of PlayStation 2 games, and Splinter Cell is no different. Another heads up is that it may take a little bit to get used to the controller configuration, since there are all those different moves to use, although veterans to the Splinter Cell series may find it easier right away. Other than those two items, the memory card won’t be used up on just this game. And for those playing online, I had no lag time with games that had a good connection speed. By the way, you can check for me online (RedDawg-PSI).

Normally, I’m more of a sports guy (as you can check out my other reviews), but I found Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow to be a nice change of pace from that genre. If you liked the first Splinter Cell, you should pick up Pandora Tomorrow today.