Let us see if third time is the charm, shall we? Well in the case of  this series it very much seems like it. Cause they mended most of the  annoying things present in the previous two games.

The graphics are much better than in the previous two games that's obvious from the get go. The character animations have been refined too, both ingame and in the cutscenes. But for me the icing are Sam's quirks towards Lambert, and during interrogations. Did I say interrogations? Yes, because in this game you can interrogate almost every random soldier, and while most of them only tell you trivial things you would find out easily anyway, it's still fun to do because of the dialogue. I only remember one or two repetition of lines in the entire game, so it doesn't even get boring.

You don't have to rely solely on the video briefings before missions to find out what you have to do, now each analyst briefs you thoroughly on those aspects of the mission that are relevant to them. And fortunately you don't even have to read these, because they really tell you in real speech. Unfortunately that's not common practice in most games even today.

But in turn you get much less input during missions about what to do, where to go. You're more on your own, like a real field agent. It happened more than once that I actually had to think about what to do, which is a big plus. Games where you actually have to think are getting very rare.

You can choose your gear before each mission, but actually this is one part of the game that is pointless as it is. I tell you why. Because you can't choose individual pieces of your equipment. You can only choose from three pre-defined outfits. And since you never know what tools you'll need during the mission you always have to take the gear containing the stuff that's not replaceable when needed. Which is always the default getup.

Finally it seems that your enemies don't have a psychic connection anymore. They no longer converge on your position instantly when you've been seen by one of them.

Now you can actually control how wide you're opening a door, so you can peek through, to check for danger behind it. Or you can also kick them down sending enemies flying behind them. A tactic keenly used by enemy combatants as well. It's really funny when they hear a noise and they start kicking down all doors around them. But more importantly the doors no longer close by themselves. They can be closed the same way you open them if you wish to.

I believe this game was in development even before the release of Pandora Tomorrow, otherwise I don't think they could've implemented so many improvements.

There is one more difference which is neither good or bad, just worth mentioning that they removed the osprey from the game, so you no longer have a regular means of transportation to and from mission areas. Another difference is story related: Sam's daughter didn't even get mentioned in this one, which is a bit strange, but not a big issue. And on the fun side of things apart from the interrogations and one-liners thrown at Lambert by Sam, he also gets his fair share of teasing from Grim about his age. I really liked those, probably this is why I love Grim so much.

After each mission you get a performance analysis, where 100% is the perfect mission. Every small thing affects the final score: the number of alarms triggered, the number of enemies killed, how many times you've been detected, etc. Ofc. since this is still a stealth game to get the perfect score you don't have to kill everyone, on the contrary you're not allowed to kill a single soul, you even have to avoid stepping on ants (just kidding), It's a good challenge for maximalists, for me it was just a fun fact, I didn't care about it that much to actually repeat a mission because of a low score. My best result was 98 percent and my worst botched mission was 27, but it was a mission complete nonetheless.

Well actually there is something they failed to fix. Sam still doesn't know how to shoot straight. The fire fights might even be a bit more biased towards the enemies than in the first two games.
Another change for the worse is that they removed the auto-save feature from the game. It doesn't even save at the start of new missions. It happened to me more than once, that I forgot to save, and when I tapped quickload I found myself on the previous mission. And ofc, because I'm back on the previous mission, the "restart mission" option is off the table as well. I've sent more than one curse words towards random relatives of the developers because of that. I only got used to having to save at the start of missions for the last three or four. I don't understand how could this shortcoming slip past all the testers.  

I was doing some calculations and arrived at the conclusion that this game was a bit expensive way of fun, because it's only six or seven hours long. There are still only 10 missions. Which means you paid about 10 bucks for each hour of gaming. But I think it might just be worth it. Especially now when you can pick it up for 10 or less.

The missions seem a bit easier now, and you're not forced to use stealth. Apart from the scoring system, there are no repercussions for leaving a pile of bodies behind.

The story is a big improvement over Pandora Tomorrow but I think it's even better than the first game's. You can feel like Jack Bauer albeit not for an entire 24 hours.

All in all it's a really big step forwards in almost every aspect.

+

  • Atmosphere  
  • Graphics  
  • Gameplay  
  • Dialouge and one liners  
  • Story  


-

  • Really short, 7 hours tops.  
  • Your visbility is not related to your visiblity....ah I won't write it down again  
  • Sam is still not big on aiming  
  • Lack of autosave on mission starts
  • Various interactions doesn't have any priorities. It happened many times that I was sneaking up on an enemy from behind, and when I wanted to grab him Sam casually turned on the light switch next to the guy. Or started picking up the body lying on the floor next to him. It would've been obvious to me to make "grab the effing soldier" the first item on the list and not "take out the garbage"  
  • Opening the "Opsat" screen doesn't pause the game. Of course it's more lifelike this way, but I feel this is just a notch too much reality in a game like this. If I wanted to achieve reality I would've taken out the full 3D automap that has all buildings down to the last detail in it instead.  


Verdict: 9/10

To me this is the best part of the series. It's a big downhill after this, but it does get better later.