"the opening beach shot with the moon stealing across a clouded sky is poetry."

One thing that all the vision shifting can do is distract you from how fabulously rich the graphics are. Sure the night sight is sharp, accurate and useful but the opening beach shot with the moon stealing across a clouded sky is poetry. When you’re not under attack, or waiting in the shadows to pounce – and there are some moments to stop and catch your breath - have a look around you and take in the quality of the textures. Light in particular is done superbly, and you need to be aware of this in relation to where you’re standing in case the visibility sensor shoots through the roof. This is matched by the excellent correspondence between sounds and character actions, voiceovers (especially Sam’s) are absolutely spot on, and once again there’s an indicator to show if you’re of catlike tread, or the proverbial bull in a china shop. You really do need to interact with your environment and care for it’s ambience to stay out of site of the guards (who once again display a solid, realistic AI.)

Game modes boasted by the developers include the standard single player, the return of the versus mode where you can opt for the stealthy Sam character, or a more mercenary assault team player, and a ‘co-op’ 2 player mode with specific missions. The single player remains the core of the game and the numerous installments, with their constantly updating primary and secondary objectives should last you a reasonable lifespan, especially if you seek to maximise your end of level stats and ratchet up the difficulty. The other options should be treated as a bonus rather than the be all and end of all of a purchasing decision, but conversely, and rather disappointingly, there is no online playability in Splinter Cell. This could have been one game to encourage more subscribers to Xbox Live as it offers genuine class and innovation.

"It’s still the most fluid, most stylish, most playable experience in third person"

These are times when franchises can become repetitively tiresome, and plots and gameplay rehashes of the same old formula. Maybe by the time of the next chapter in the Sam fisher story we might need to see a little more enhancement but for the moment this is another slice of class. Chaos Theory doesn’t claim to be a revolution from what you know already, but that’s because it knows that what it does is the very best. It’s still the most fluid, most stylish, most playable experience in third person action and adds another worthy page turner to the Tom Clancy library.