Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Blacklist

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Blacklist is the last entry in the famous stealth series and one of the few major action titles for adults to reach Wii U. Sam Fisher leads the new Fourth Echelon unit here, trying to stop a series of attacks on American targets announced by a group of ultimatums called the Blacklist. The player's base of operations is the flying command aircraft Paladin, from which missions are selected, gear is upgraded, and side objectives from team members are accepted. The structure is therefore looser than before, and the player decides for themselves what to invest their earned money into.

The core of the game remains sneaking through the dark, tracking patrols, silent takedowns, and using gadgets, from the classic cable under a door to a drone and sticky cameras. Blacklist, however, openly offers three play styles and rewards all of them: a fully silent approach without a single detection, aggressive stealth with fast on-the-move executions, and open firefights. The system of marking targets and instantly taking them out gives the action a cinematic pace, yet the hardest and most highly regarded approach remains the one where nobody even notices someone was there. Alongside the campaign, the game also offered cooperative missions and the return of the asymmetric mode, where one side plays as spies and the other as mercenaries.

The Wii U version used the GamePad screen as a map, gear selection, and drone control, which made a lot of sense in a game built around planning. Visually it relies on the contrast between darkness and pools of light, and the atmosphere is carried above all by sound, footsteps, snatches of guard conversation, and tense underscores. Reviews were very good, with reservations mainly aimed at the change of voice actor for the main character, which fans of previous entries had gotten used to. Sales, however, fell short of expectations, and the series went quiet for many years, leaving Blacklist as its final major entry. Today it's one of the best-executed stealth games of its time, one that managed to satisfy purists and players wanting a faster pace alike.