These are the only stealth missions where you have to infiltrate in forbidden areas of the compound and steal and gather informations for the NSA. Sometimes the job is hard and frustrating but at the same time tense and rewarding in the end. You will use several times the load function before finding the right way to pass the guards or cameras. But even these missions are getting boring because every time you have to walk through the same corridors and pass the same guards in order to complete the tasks. Ubisoft introduced also some puzzles to create a more varied gameplay, but it's out of place to decrypt an email by completing a sudoku puzzle.

The Goggles

Sam always had an advantage on his side: the darkness. All previously three episodes were concentrated on this subterfuge but unlike all of this, most missions in Double Agent take place in daylight. You have to forget the warm cover assured by the shadows and the night. The strategy of hiding in the dark is replaced here by taking cover behind crates and other objects or walls.

There is no need anymore to use the vision goggles. I could easily end the whole game without using this gadget although it was created as a useful tool in previous episodes. At least Sam gets sunglasses in Africa mission. If you push the night vision button, Sam will take off his sunglasses and the image will become much more shining. Putting them back on, the image will become slightly darker, giving you the feeling that you actually wear sunglasses.

Nice but useless. I really don't understand why they almost quit using the vision goggles, when in the first episode of the series they had an argue with Tom Clancy regarding it. The problem was that Ubisoft wanted to implement two functions in the same goggles: the thermal and night vision, which technically speaking is impossible to create such thing. But Ubisoft insisted on this idea which actually gave the gameplay a new dimension.

Health

Forget about health packs. Sam doesn't need them anymore. That's because his health recovers automatically after every hit if you immediately take cover. There are only two ways in which you can die. Either fall from a high position or get caught in running fire. This is a minus for the realism in the game, but at the same time makes you concentrate more on completing the tasks than on managing your health. A good decision for the beginners, but not for the veterans of the series.

The multiplayer

The multiplayer is the only thing that makes this game unique and much better than the other episodes. While in the last two Splinter Cell games, the multiplayer offered different maps with different objectives, the experience was pretty similar. If you are a spy you have to download information from several terminals and return to the insertion point, while the mercenaries must stop them. As a spy you play from third person view like Sam, while as a mercenary you play from a first person view. The spies are much faster than the mercenary and are using the shadows to take cover. The mercenaries are equipped with big guns with unlimited ammo and different detecting gadgets. These different perspectives makes the multiplayer interesting and exciting to play. Double Agent brings in addition bonuses for winning succesive matches, the ability of forming squads and play against other squads and play with or against bots. These bots are only implemented on the mercenaries side. The only explanation is that the spies behavior is much more complicated and needs a very complex artificial intelligence to be implemented. Like in Chaos Theory, Double Agent features again a series of cooperative missions. You can play with other two players as the spies against mercenaries bots. Though similar, these missions are not like the ones in Chaos Theory. These missions don't have a story and the gameplay is much faster than the single player.