Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow’s Spies vs. Mercs mode still outclasses its campaign

Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow arrived in 2004 as the second game in the Splinter Cell series, developed by Ubisoft Shanghai and published by Ubisoft Entertainment. It follows Sam Fisher, an operative for the NSA’s black-ops branch Third Echelon, across Xbox, Nintendo GameCube, PC, PlayStation 2, and eventually Xbox One through backward compatibility. Michael Ironside returns as the voice of Fisher. Lalo Schifrin wrote the theme music.

The game is a strong follow-up to the original Splinter Cell. It is also, in places, a cautious one. That tension runs through everything worth saying about it.

Sam Fisher Returns to East Timor

The setup is specific and strange in the way the best Clancy material often is. In March 2006, the United States has established a military presence in the newly independent country of East Timor to train its military. Several anti-separatist Indonesian guerrilla militias oppose East Timor’s formation. The foremost among them is Darah Dan Doa, which translates to Blood and Prayer, led by Suhadi Sadono.

Sadono is not a blank villain. He was trained by the CIA to fight communism in the region, and he has grown resentful of U.S. support for East Timor’s independence. That detail does more work than most of the game’s cutscenes.

After an attack on the U.S. embassy in Dili, Third Echelon investigates. Director Irving Lambert tells Fisher that his old friend Douglas Shetland, a former soldier turned PMC owner, is among the hostages. Dennis Haysbert voices Lambert here, the only time Lambert is not voiced by Don Jordan.

Fisher infiltrates the embassy. He learns from Shetland and CIA operative Ingrid Karlthson that Sadono is working with an unknown figure called “Mortified Penguin,” who is conducting business in Paris. The hostages are rescued. The U.S. Army then launches a campaign against Darah Dan Doa, and Indonesia objects to its operations.

The Mechanics That Changed

The gameplay of Pandora Tomorrow is largely unchanged from the original Splinter Cell. That is the honest headline. But the small changes matter more than their size suggests.

Health kits are no longer an inventory item. Sam’s pistol gets a laser sight, so the player knows exactly where rounds will strike, even while moving. Sam can whistle to attract enemies. He can open doors while carrying a body. He can shoot while hanging upside down. He can perform a SWAT turn to pass doorways unnoticed, moving from one side of the door to the other while covered. He can perform a half split jump.

The PlayStation 2 and GameCube versions add an extra single-player mission to compensate for abridged gameplay compared with the PC and Xbox versions. That is a real difference between the versions, and it is worth knowing before you pick one up.

Paris, Smallpox, and a Rogue Agent

The back half of Pandora Tomorrow moves to Paris, where mercenaries hired by “Mortified” break into a cryogenic lab and steal ND133 containers. These are self-contained cryogenic containers used for transporting and storing human brains. Third Echelon identifies “Mortified” as Norman Soth, a former U.S. soldier turned CIA agent who has gone rogue.

Soth has struck a deal with Syrian terrorists based in Jerusalem. Third Echelon works with Israel’s Shin Bet agents and finds that Soth bought containers of manufactured smallpox virus, which he means to use as bioweapons. Lambert learns the bioweapons serve as an insurance policy for Sadono.

That is a lot of plot, and the game carries it with a straight face. The brain containers are the kind of detail that could read as absurd. In practice they land as grim, which is the correct register for this series.

Multiplayer Was the Real Leap

The multiplayer component is what critics praised most at release, and it became a staple of the series. That judgment holds up.

Here is how the versions compare on the details the source establishes:

Online multiplayer on the original Xbox shut down in 2010. Pandora Tomorrow is now playable online again on replacement Xbox Live servers called Insignia. A 2004 stealth title with a dead online mode got a second chance from a community-run server project, and that is not nothing.

A side-scrolling adaptation for Game Boy Advance and mobile phones was released to mixed reception. It is not the version anyone should seek out first.

A sequel, Chaos Theory, arrived in 2005.

What Pandora Tomorrow Actually Is

Pandora Tomorrow is a sequel that plays it safe in single player and takes a real swing in multiplayer. The campaign is competent and politically textured. The multiplayer is the part critics singled out.

The published critical score is 7.8/10, drawn from an IGDB critic aggregate across six outlets. That number feels right. This is a good game with one great idea.

The gameplay of Pandora Tomorrow is largely unchanged from the original Splinter Cell.

That line comes from the source’s description of the game, and it is both the review and the problem. Ubisoft Shanghai built a sequel that trusted its multiplayer to carry the new weight. The laser sight, the SWAT turn, the half split jump — these are refinements, not reinventions.

What keeps Pandora Tomorrow in circulation is the online mode’s second life. Insignia brought it back, and the campaign remains a 7.8.

game review · Pandora Tomorrow · retro gaming · Splinter Cell · stealth games · Ubisoft