Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell - Chaos Theory (Nintendo DS)

This is my first of two reviews for Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell – Chaos Theory. I’ve been playing the game on both the Nintendo DS and the Xbox. This time around I’m reviewing the DS version. I want to start off by saying that I am new to the Splinter Cell world and have not played either of the two preceding games.

I got this game because I was looking for a game on the DS that was aimed at an older audience and had a story line that would take a good amount of time to play through. Online this game got a lot of mediocre reviews, but I noticed that a lot of the reviewers were comparing it to the console version which is not fair. After seeing some good reviews I decided to give it a chance – I’m glad I did.

The game follows the same story line as the console and PC versions, but the levels have been redesigned for the DS. The levels are mostly linear, but each level has many places where you can choose how you will approach the situation and solve the problems in different ways. The weapons are a bit different and some of them have different capabilities. I found the game play very engaging and I was glued to the game for hours at a time. The overall story is excellent and I often found myself turning the DS trying to look around corners.

The game presentation is very much like the console version with 3D graphics in 3rd person perspective. The graphics are decent for the size of the screens but all of the levels are quite dark (but that is the nature of a stealth-oriented game). I did however find that different viewing modes (thermal and night vision) did slow down the frame rate considerably. Luckily you don’t really have to use the night vision much and the areas you require the thermal vision don’t require a fast frame rate.

I found the controls well laid out. The D-pad is used to move your character around. The other buttons all perform various functions in the game, and the touch screen is used considerably – it is used for camera control, weapon selection and menu navigation. You do have to switch between the buttons and the touch pad often, but I quickly got used to holding my stylus between my index and middle finger while using the buttons and moving between the buttons and touch pad quite seamlessly.

There is a two-player multiplayer mode, but I don’t know anyone else with the game (it is a two card multiplayer) so I can’t really review that aspect.

Overall, I was very happy with this version of Chaos Theory. In fact, I liked it so much I went out and bought the Xbox version to see what big brother was like. I’ll review that as soon as I get through it.

Chaos Theory for Nintendo DS gets an 8 out of 10.