The brand new Mark and Exe🌸cute maneuver certainly helps in that regard. Stealthily take out someone using your bare hands, and you’ll land you a couple “free*” kills. Here, you can mark your multiple targets from behind cover, then -*pip-pip* - execute numerous enemies with the touch of a single𓄧 button.

Above: Markand Execute mutiple fools in less than a second

*Hardened Clancy-philes may consider this “dumbed down,” but trust me, that shit is earned! This is no free kill. It’s not exactly easy to take a guy out up close, and pulling off the perfect Execution requires a keen sense of timing, since even the haphazard squeeze of a silenced trigger wil🍸l alert everyone in the vicinity.

Above: Interrogations follow a x3 beat that gets old after a while

It feels like Splint🅰er Cell: Conviction desperately wanted to break free from its mold to become more focused on gunplay. But it doesn'ಌt, really. Outside of a level that flashes back to the first (best?) Gulf War, squeezing the trigger and emptying a clip is pretty much a liability that’ll instantly remind you that THIS IS NOT A SHOOTER.

THREE THINGS: This is Splinter Cell: Conviction. This is Iraq twenty years ago. And that is NOT Sam Fisher

Splinter Cell has always been - and very much still is - about being patient. You’ll certainly spend a lot less times cooling your heels under the cover of darkness, but that’s still very much the basis of the gameplay. Enemy behavior and overall presentation are still a marvel to behold. But Conviction couldn’t shake something that’s plagued the rest of the series in many p๊layers' eyes, and that’s the overwhelming feeling th💜at when you survive, it’s based largely on luck, and not your own badassery.

As Fisher&rsq✤uo;s campaign goes on, many pieces of the environment that showcase any sort of uniqueness - like pipes, window ledges, and shootable lights - eventually just disappear… And the game reveals what it really is: wave after wave of being outnumbered by enemies in hallways with very little deviation.