Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Double Agent [GC]

Not to butcher an old and beloved adage, but it's all fun and games until you can't respawn anymore. With Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Double Agent, Ubisoft has crafted a marvelous riotous multiplayer experience involving stealthy spies and the cold-hearted mercenaries who love to shoot them.

Ubisoft recently showed off Double Agent's multiplayer prowess on Xbox and its more powerful sibling, the Xbox 360. At once, it's evident Ubisoft wasn't content to rest on the strength of the multiplayer aspects of previous Splinter Cell games such as Pandora Tomorrow and Chaos Theory. Both titles, while excellent in their own right, only featured four-player competitions with two teams of two. Double Agent adds a third player to each side, allowing for six players in any given multiplayer contest. For Xbox 360, Ubisoft chose to highlight its new take on spies vs. mercenaries play. For Xbox, the focus was very much put on the brand-new spy vs. spy mode.

With the 360 version of Double Agent, multiplayer is immediately familiar. Spies, who are shown in the third-person perspective, are tasked with stealing valuable information from color-coded terminals, and the first-person perspective mercenaries must prevent them from doing such. Previous editions of Splinter Cell had contests ending when the information was stolen; the new twist here is that once players have downloaded their precious booty, they must return it to a control drone.

Spies have been equipped with a new hacking tool. The tool is accessed by pushing the Xbox 360's right trigger and the A button. To use the colorful language of the streets, it is one bad mother. It gives spies the ability to hack into the game's terminals from long-distance; if a terminal is within a spy's line of sight, its information can be extracted from with the hacking tool.

The advantages of this new tool are immediately obvious: Spies no longer need become sitting ducks in order to hack terminals. Although downloads occur more slowly the farther away a spy is from a terminal he's hacking, it's certainly a fair trade-off for the ability to remain largely concealed while retrieving data. The tool can also be used to knock out lights from a distance, and nearby mercenaries can have their electronics hacked as well.

The mercenaries can now track their enemies via a motion-cum-proximity sensor. This sensor detects when a spy is within a given radius, and pulses with ever-greater intensity as the distance between the two closes. Mercenaries can also utilize a flying drone that explodes when it comes in close proximity to a spy. In this way, a mercenary can track and kill a foe who's hidden himself in an air duct or crawlspace.

The Xbox edition of Double Agent offers spies competing against other spies. Here, the goals are similar to spies vs. mercenaries, but Ubisoft has introduced a brand-new skill- and timing-based combat system to determine which spy comes out on top in a given encounter. Close-combat moves are initiated by pulling the Xbox controller's right trigger. A circular diagram appears on screen and the brawling spies are prompted to push either the A, B, X, or Y gameplay buttons; the first player to push the correct button wins the fight, and gets to keep his life.