Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Double Agent (PC)

Being a newcomer to the whole stealth genre, my very first foray into this shadowy word was with Splinter Cell. At first I was pretty bored with the whole moving in the shadows bit, but once I really got into the thick of things, I fell for it hook, line and sinker. Pandora Tomorrow, the second game in this franchise was a pretty 'meh' experience, but Ubisoft really managed to redeem themselves with Chaos Theory, the third Splinter Cell game that practically re-invented the entire series. Now after Chaos Theory, Ubisoft decided to go the next gen way with Double Agent, which is fine by me, but unfortunately, this outing isn’t a very pleasant one, especially for the PC community.

Not only is this game highly demanding (and unreasonable) on the system, but it’s plagued by a truckload of technical issues that can totally put you off the game. For example, in one of the game’s missions (Shanghai level if I’m not wrong), I had to make my way to a particular room to procure certain documents and every time I approached it, I kept falling through the freaking floor and out of the hotel. Frustrating? You betcha! Want more? How about this; I screw up in one mission and get detected by an enemy who swiftly removes his gun to silence me; only thing is none of his bullets affect me and my health bar remains unaffected after being shot at with an automatic weapon for five minutes. Metropolis called, they want Superman back.

The reason I call the system requirements unreasonable is because you WILL NOT (feel the emphasis here) be able to run the game unless and until your graphic card supports Shader Model 3.0. This has got to be the stupidest move I’ve seen in a long time because Ubisoft has alienated nearly 50% (or more) of the PC gaming community with such high requirements. If that wasn’t bad enough, most of the game crawls at a painful 20 – 25 FPS constantly (even on our GeForce 7900 GTX); in fact during certain levels, it even dips down to a vomit inducing 7 - 8 FPS. I’m sorry, but this is totally unacceptable; I mean I shell out thousands on that sparkling new graphic card, and I can’t even get 30 FPS? Lame, lame LAME…