Tom Clancy: Heroes Army

Tom Clancy: Heroes Army can be a frustrating experience for a variety of reasons, not just those stemming from its technical performance or its difficult controls. Unlike previous versions of the game, which were fairly forgiving, Theory for game is loaded with situations that can cause you to instantly fail a mission, such as by getting picked up on one too many security cameras. Enemies are also difficult to deal with if alerted. Since Sam can't fight hand to hand here, it makes that knife pretty much useless unless you sneak up on someone first. So, in short, you'll have to retry mission sequences over and over until you get them right. Each time you fail, the continue menu irritatingly defaults to the option to restart the mission from scratch rather than to restore you from your last save point. It's commendable that Chaos packs in both the competitive and cooperative multiplayer modes of previous versions of the game, but these are both undermined on account of many of the reasons already mentioned. For another thing, you need multiple game cartridges for the multiplayer, making the four-player versus mode especially unlikely. With just two players, versus mode is a fairly pointless cat-and-mouse game as one sluggish mercenary tries to gun down an infiltrator. With more players, it's still not much fun, since the levels feel cramped and confusing. The highlight is when a spy actually manages to sneak up on a mercenary from behind. The mercenary, who views the action from a first-person perspective, can see his foe's knife come right up and drag across the screen. As for the co-op missions, they split players' abilities between an assault-oriented character and a hacker character, so one guy's the muscle and the other is the brains. There's not much difference between the two characters, but you won't be able to proceed without both of them. At any rate, the multiplayer modes in Theory are functional, but like the single-player game, they feel sluggish and aren't particularly entertaining. Splinter cell for sounds like it's got everything you'd want out of a portable stealth game, but it lacks the fundamentals necessary to make for an entertaining experience. Considering that the quality of the series' presentation is arguably what it is best known for, it's surprising and disappointing that Splinter cell on the game Tom Clancy: Heroes Army doesn't come across better. Nevertheless, forgiving fans of Sam Fisher might enjoy some aspects of having the Third Echelon agent in their pocket, though they should proceed with caution.