Z-Reviews || Games || Review

Its official: Triz-man has played Pandora Tomorrow and gives his official 2 thumbs up for it being a kick a$$ single-player game. There are, however, many flaws that needed to be fixed in the multiplayer aspect of the game (which I think should have been a separate installation altogether.) Suggestion to game makers: keep games like this, with a dual game aspect, to 2 different installations.

This game is a very large install for any PC gamer. So you can make good use of all those large hard drives you have been collecting in your super-computer. The game install was about 3 gigabytes of hard drive space for a full install. For multiplayer they ask you to install Punkbuster, which is nice, but also one of the bugs that prevents you from playing in the majority of the multiplayer games online at UBI.com. The Punkbuster bug has been discussed on UBI’s forum and causes the tab that allows you to enable Punkbuster to disappear. It was only after a full reinstall that it was re-enabled. Installation in general was a pain. I had many issues getting it to work. It took me 3 times until I got I to work. Even then, I was still left me with a bug for the multi play.

Ok well before you go nuts and decide not to buy the game for all its faults I will admit that reading the install notes helped a bit. I didn’t read them before installing and I might have saved myself some time. For some reason Windows XP isn’t as nice as Windows 98/ME in the way it installs this particular game. The interface is different so it requires people with XP to install in full screen view. According to UBI’s instructions you should install the game in XP with full view on, which in my guess means that you have to have the install window maximized, or at least focused. This didn’t seem to affect my installs either way. The game uses Safe disk 3 for copy protection from piracy. Though I was able to make an image of the disks with Alcohol 120%’s newest version, it doesn’t make exact copies of the game discs, but you can emulate the game play disc 3. If you’re like me and don’t like to look around for your CD to play a game this is useful to know. There are also unofficial patches that can do the same thing, but only for single player mode. Multiplayer has a disc check as well as a unique serial code which is becoming the standard in today’s world of rampant piracy.

Though I have read that they have fixed issues for the Xbox version and the Demo, so far has nothing been implemented for the PC user. Which either means that there are a host of fixes that need to be addressed, thus requiring more time to make proper the proper patches, or that UBI just cares more for the populated Xbox Live scene. Either way, if you are planning to buy this game it is worth the cash, and maybe then some if the multiplayer aspect of the game gets any better. So far my multiplayer experience has been shabby do to the lack of support in the PC department.

The Plot of Pandora Tomorrow is based around secret agent Sam Fisher trying to track down a terrorist from East Timor which is in Indonesia. The terrorist is holding vials of a variation of the small pox virus, which I am guessing is biologically modified by some mad scientist. It’s not really explained how these vials called ND166 (Small Pox Green Toxins) are created. The story isn’t all that interesting, but the overall gameplay is simple and fun compared to the first game. So if you liked the first one but found certain things frustrating about it then this time you may be pleased. UBI took out all of the headaches of wall jumping and created a game for almost completely stealth action. Though I did find it a bit easy to beat, the fun factor of the game was similar to playing Max Payne 2.

Let’s get into the aspects of the single player game. Not much has been changed from the original Splinter Cell. All the weapons that I remember from before are the same. For the single player missions you still play as super spy Sam Fisher. He’s some imaginary Tom Clancy-created agent of a hidden branch of the NSA called the Fifth Freedom. Apparently American endorsed assassins are cool, because they have the right to use night vision and thermal vision to shoot bad guys in the head at will.

“I alone have the Fifth Freedom: the right to spy, steal, destroy, and assassinate in order to protect America and her freedoms. If I am captured or compromised, my country and president will and must disavow any knowledge of my existence and the Fifth Freedom. I am Sam Fisher. I am SPLINTER CELL”

They did however beef up the game for sure. From the minimum requirements of an ATI 8500 card tells you that this game is pushing more polygons. Though it doesn’t seem like its’ much prettier then the first installment of Splinter Cell. There were a few parts that amazed me, such as some lighting effects which weren’t present in the first game. But to me the game isn’t really about the looks, but more the overall gameplay. Compared to the original, the game is a lot more straightforward as far as the puzzles are concerned. Gameplay is linear as ever, just as the original Splinter Cell was. You do your missions and then you watch a cut scene. You do another mission and so on.

There really wasn’t any section that I was ever really stuck on. The PC version gives you the ability to quick-save. The game flies by a lot faster if you learn to save, save, save. My method was to save every few minutes with the F5 button and if I got shot to just reload a quick-save with F8. Voila you get your health back. Though I did regular saves as well, just incase, I saved at a spot that wasn’t good to go back from. One feature that is missing is multiple quick-save option that games such as Tomb Raider have. Basically if you quick save at a bad point you can go back to another quick-save point. Splinter Cell doesn’t have this feature, but they do give you the ability to save to an unlimited amount of save slots. I have yet to try to see if there was a limit, but after 32 saved games I was convinced that this was good enough to assume it is without limits.

The game is supposed to be based completely on being stealthy. However, if you have your gamma levels up you can see everything. There are some points where you are hidden to the AI but it is unrealistic, as it is clear how visible you are to yourself. The AI hasn’t improved much as far as their ability to detect you. The HUD detector determines if you are visible or not, even if you’re in half lit lighting, so this aspect becomes very easy. Most of the gameplay is in black and white because you end up using your night-vision goggles most of the time. I, however, regularly switched it off, just to see how nice the maps looked. The problem with night-vision is that it seems to lower the resolution of your image when you change between vision modes. The black and white night-vision seems very pixilated, which didn’t seem to be the case in the old game. Rarely do you use the thermal vision. I only found it useful using it at the end where you have to spot out certain bad guys.

As for the changes, there are some features of the old game that I miss, such as the ability to side-jump up a wall. I think they replaced it with a half split jump so you can reach higher heights. In the original game I got stuck because I didn’t know how to do this move: where you jump off a wall while facing an adjacent wall. This game how ever doesn’t have that feature at all. I tried to do the old method of pressing the jump button twice to do a wall jump but Sam can’t do it now. He still has a standard split, but I never could find a spot that would make use of that move. There never seemed to be any spots in this game to make use of the cool upside down shooting or splits. The map-makers do force you to use the half split feature to get to higher ground, but I guess that was just to show off the new feature.

Another old feature that was taken away was the way you collect health. Before you collected packets at certain points and used them accordingly. Now there are heal up kits along the way. So if you get hurt you have to heal at the specified locations.

The hand gun now has a laser site which I don’t recall seeing in the first game. It’s a nice feature because the AI units can see it and sense that a little red dot means trouble is amidst.

As for the weapons, they are all the same, other than the way you select them. It’s not as easy to select the items now. You press the alt button to switch between guns and picking secondary items. This menu feels like a poorly constructed Macromedia Flash menu.
There is now a dedicated button to whistling from the projectile camera as well as from your character. Now you can physically whistle to get the attention of one or two nearby bad guys, or non bad guys. This is just to get them closer to your location, in the dark preferably, to knock them out or shoot them out of the site of others, otherwise leading to an army of fighters storming your direction.

Another change appears in sniper mode. Your vision seems clear in zoom mode with your binoculars, but now a blurring effect has been implemented with your gun zoomed in. I guess this is to simulate real life shooting? Not sure if it is an improvement on making the game more realistic, but it is not a large factor either way. You still get to stabilize the gun with secondary fire in sniper mode.

The online/multiplayer aspect of the PC version of Pandora Tomorrow is currently not acceptable do to the lack of support for all the bugs and glitches it has. The minimum requirement for Internet connection speed is labeled to be a 64kbit connection. This is more than what a modem can handle but it does seem to work fairly well if you have a good connection at the full speed of 56k. Keeping that in mind, and the fact that the max amounts of players is limited to 4, it makes the game stable for a first-person-shooter kind of game. I did, as mentioned before, run into a few problems. One being that I lost the tab button that allows you to join Punkbuster enabled games. But, like I said before, after a reinstall it worked again. I still had other issues inside the game, such as I would jump in and out of walls. So the multiplayer game should be treated as a totally different game.

The multiplayer mode includes one side playing as spies of the Dark Fifth Freedom, who are supposed to collect the vials of smallpox. While the other side, which play as mercenaries, are suppose to kill them. Spies basically have every ability that Sam does, but without his cool guns and almost all of his secondary items. They simply have a gun that can stun the enemy for a short time. This is meant to give them time to go in for close-quarter kills. Mercenaries are ranged fighters that stay in first person mode all of the time. They have killer weapons and cool motion detection goggles, which are really hard to use. But, in my opinion, the inability to easily see the spies is the point of the game. Spies have the best vision with night-vision goggles. They also have thermal vision, but it is very posterized in comparison to the real game - meaning the color spectrum is reduced a lot compared to the single player version, making it look much worse.

Spies have all the abilities that Sam has as far as climbing walls as well as an extra back-flip feature that Sam Fisher does not get. It is supposed to help you out if someone is chasing you, as you can back-flip to land behind them for a nice close-combat kill. Mercenaries basically have the typical Quake-type guns that they use against the spies. It would seem that they have the advantage at first, but spies have their own tricks like gas grenades. Spies can also climb into vents that can not be accessed as a mercenary. Much of it comes down to just how good you are at seeing in darkly light first-person-shooter style games. However teamwork also plays an important role in the multiplayer experience.

Overall the single player experience is a must for all that enjoy this genre. The multiplayer mode needs much improvement to get my thumbs up. The potential for it to be a great online experience is very good, and if everything is fixed then I wouldn’t put this behind any of the current multiplayer shooter favorites.

One strange thing to note about the game is that when you complete the game you can’t go back into it and play missions you missed. There are many mini-missions that aren’t necessary to complete to beat the game but might be fun to try after finishing the game. This isn’t possible. You have to load old games at previous points and replay the whole game from those points on. Not a big deal, but it might have been nice.