The last time a Splinter Cell came out on the Gamecube it was hard not to feel a little cheated. First of all, we had to wait almost half a year to play it, while X-Box owners were already happily sneaking Sam Fisher through dark rooms. Secondly, and more importantly, the version we got after those five months wasn't as polished as the X-Box version by far. The Gamecube version was developed together with the PS2 version and to make the game possible on these platforms quite a few areas were compromised. The level of detail and the lighting effects were severely dumbed down for the Cube and the PS2. Even the gameplay was changed; the X-Box version was more challenging than the Cube version.

It looks like Ubisoft is trying not to make the same mistakes twice. Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow is set to be released on the Cube four months after the X-Box version. That's still quite a long time but it's getting better. The release date may not be perfect yet, the graphics have gotten a welcome update. Where the X-Box and Cube versions of the first Splinter Cell sometimes looked like completely different games, Pandora Tomorrow looks more or less the same on both platforms. Of course the X-Box version still has a few graphic advantages, but at least the differences aren't as apparent as the last time around.

 

The game starts off with a nice demonstration of the engine. Your first mission is in a small village where you are introduced to some of the new features; you get to wade through impressive looking shallow water, evade a couple of land mines and do SWAT turns to get past opened doors undetected. Most of the new features do a good job of enhancing the stealth gameplay, they're not just new moves that look nice, you actually need them to get through the game in one piece. Getting through in one piece is far from easy, since the AI is beefed up quite a bit since the original. Guards have different states of alert; if they hear a vague sound they just check the area before returning to their normal patrol, but if they're sure they have seen you they'll put on heavier body armor and alert their buddies. Because of the improved AI it's even more advisable to stay undetected than in the first game, playing like Rambo will surely end up in a mission failure.

The visuals are still among the darkest you'll ever come across, but the darkness is more varied than in the first game. Ubisoft makes excellent use of darkness in different surroundings; a dark rainy village on Jakarta looks completely different from a dark abandoned subway system. Pandora Tomorrow also departs from the standard stay-in-the-shadows gameplay that every stealth game offers, in the subway level the headlights of passing trains destroy your safe shadows every now and then, and in the first level you need to walk in a spotlight to stay hidden from a guard with a night visor. All this sneaking and crawling controls really smooth, since the buttons from the X-Box version are mapped to the Cube controller more effectively than in the first game. The A is still the context sensitive button but it gets more functions this time around, like the SWAT turn and healing at health stations.

 

Ubisoft obviously tried hard to please Cube gamers this time, but they left one huge feature out of the Cube version again; the multiplayer mode. On the X-Box and PC this was the main reason Pandora Tomorrow was a different game from the first Splinter Cell, it really gave a new twist to the stealth. You could play two on two matches, one team being Sam Fishers, one team FPS-like soldiers. Trying to hide from a human opponent forces you to completely change the way you play, there's no peeking around corners and learning your opponent's patrol route for instance. We'll have to do without this mode though, Sam will have to do everything by himself on the Cube. The single player mode looks like a solid experience though, but we'll have to play Pandora Tomorrow more to see if there's enough fun left to make this a good game. Stay tuned for a few direct-feed movie clips next week and a full review later on.