Sam Fisher is a broken man. Grieving over the sudden loss of his daughter, he is thrown into jail in his breakdown as an undercover mole. With nothing left to lose, Sam is faced to choose between serving those who aim to uphold the peace and serving those who threaten to disrupt it. Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Double Agent is the first next generation leap for the acclaimed stealth series from Ubisoft. Whilst co-existing on current generation consoles, the Xbox 360 and PC versions of Double Agent are an entirely unique experience that sets to shake up the conventions of the tested stealth gameplay for a new generation.

Shoot innocents. Impress your friends!

As the title suggests, the big new addition to Double Agent has Sam now serving the terrorist group John Brown's Army (JBA), as a double agent for the National Security Agency (NSA) to uncover and prevent their latest plans of action. Consequently, it is your responsibility to balance the competing interests of each group, represented by two trust meters. Let one of these meters drain and it's mission over. Unlike any game in the series before, Double Agent adds a real depth to the game, focusing on the story, the protagonists and most importantly morality. Through out the story you encounter Directed Moments that literally place you in the position of executioner, allowing you to determine the fate of characters in the game. These decisions impact on the game you play, changing the levels that you play and the way you will have to play them, and ultimately the ending you receive, with three potential endings based on your actions through out the game.

The core of the gameplay is largely unchanged and veterans will feel right at home from the get go. Unlike other Splinter Cell games though, Sam is no longer dependent on the cover of darkness and will be without his trademark green goggles for half the game. Instead, you are going to find yourself in broad daylight for many missions. This has a significant effect on the gameplay and is truly going to encourage new strategies to emerge to deal with these new surroundings. On one level in particular, Sam finds himself in the middle of a full-scale war. With the sun shining brightly and gunfire all around you, you will truly need to rethink a whole new level of stealth... or not. More than ever, Double Agent truly allows the player to chose whether to tackle missions unseen or guns blazing. The game has been made a lot more forgiving in many respects. The alarm system has been nearly completely removed and will only be an issue if you wish to complete all the star objectives and fill out your inventory. A regenerative health system has been implemented also, so you'll never need to search for that next medipak and can focus on the mission at hand. You will go down in about three shots if you're not careful though. The gung-ho approach is often the most enticing route through the game, making this a great game even if you're not a fan of the stealth genre. One level in particular, after having read an email about a cracked aquarium, I was confronted by two guards chatting in front of the aquarium. Needless to say, it took me twenty attempts to pass through the room without blowing open the

Tell me where you hid the god damn towels!

aquarium, knocking the guards halfway across the room. The addition of Directed Moments to the gameplay keeps the game fresh, offering what are essentially mini-games, not too dissimilar from the lock picking and safecracking we have grown accustomed to. These moments leave you with rapid tasks such as to deploying your parachute once it becomes entangled and more interestingly, place a gun in your hand and tell you to kill a man, or not kill them depending on your decision.

Double Agent takes Sam jet setting across the world to a number of stunning locations - from a Chinese New Year complete with fireworks displays, to a cruise ship off the coast of Mexico being investigated by the coast guard. Ultimately though, the bulk of the story mode missions take place in the JBA headquarters. Inside the compound, the JBA have given you restricted access around the complex to carry out some general tasks, get caught snooping around and your trust with the JBA will drop. As you progress through the missions, you will gain new information and gadgets that grant you further access through out the security systems of the compound. With the addition of a thirty-minute timer on most missions, it keeps the gameplay fresh and you will always be looking at different elements of the compound. You never become tired of the surroundings, just simply more aware.

In a touch of visual appeal and streamlined mechanics, Double Agent assumes a more organic approach to the game play. Gone are the HUD elements of previous games. The life system has been replaced with a regenerative life system like Gears of War and no longer will you have a darkness and sound meter to guide you through the game. Instead Sam is equipped with a light on his front and back that glows one of 3 colours dependent on your current visibility. The light ranges from green for invisible, yellow for exposed and red for identified as an intruder. Whilst simplified, the lack of a HUD allows you to focus more on your surroundings and become more naturally self aware, it really allows you to focus on the gameplay and makes the game all the more enjoyable for veterans and newcomers alike.

Sam Fisher returns with his thighs of steel

For many gamers, multiplayer is the real attraction in the Splinter Cell games and for the next generation versions, Ubisoft have taken the traditional Spies Vs Mercs multiplayer from Chaos Theory and Pandora Tomorrow, and completely reworked the game mechanics. You will still be trying to sneak your way to terminals to extract files as a spy, but the way you do that has been totally changed. Spies are no longer equipped with the electrical stun guns, instead they have a wristband computer that allows them to remotely disable lights, destroy glass panes and most important hack computers from a distance of 10m. This may seem to remove the tension in downloading a file directly from a terminal, but Ubisoft have designed it so that your distance from the terminal determines the rate of the download. Try hiding away in the rafters and the mercs will have more than enough time to track you down, hack right next to the terminal and you will have to weigh up the risk of a merc catching you in your tracks. It really just increases your options of how to extract files without making the process anymore easier. The spies themselves are more aerobatic than ever, making the game play more fluid and natural than ever. As for the mercs they have received a fairly significant overhaul. Motion tracking is a part of the normal vision mode and a motion sensor for when in a spy's presence now comes standard. Mines have been removed from the merc inventory though, which greatly removes from campers who would make the terminals inaccessible and is a welcome deduction in my experience.

At first, the changes to the game play might come as quite a shock to Chaos Theory veterans, but Ubisoft have perfectly tweaked the multiplayer to greatly level the gameplay and remove the possibility for camper gameplay. With four terminals per map and a maximum of three players a side, never is there enough mercs to camp each terminal, but at the same time, neither is there enough spies to tackle all terminals at once. The removal of the electric stun gun and mines removes camping from both sides, keeping the game not just fresh, but fun.

Go on, shoot it. You know you want to...

One of the most disappointing factors of the next-gen Double Agent is that whilst Co-op returns once again and is more plentiful than the four missions found in Chaos Theory, it is merely a facet of the Spies Vs Mercs gameplay. Unlike the objective based gameplay that was such a treat in Chaos Theory, pitting you as two unnamed agents with Sam's full arsenal, Co-Op in Double Agent, for the most part, plays like multiplayer against bots. It has the same locations, same inventory and largely the same objectives. It simply doesn't have the same attraction that the Co-Op in Chaos Theory had and will quickly leave you wanting to get stuck back into some three-on-three online play.

The other main gripe with the game is selecting gadgets from your inventory. Whilst it is simple enough in selecting Sam's trusty SC-20K rifle and pistol, by the latter stages of the game, if you have completed all the star based objectives you will simply have so much gear that your inventory will be overflowing. With three types of mine, six types of grenade and no less than nine different attachments for the SC-20K, sifting through your inventory to find a smoke grenade once you've been spotted will more than likely leave you dead. Instead the right gadget must be determined before entering a situation, further adding to the trial and error nature of the stealth based gameplay. Similarly, even the selection of vision modes is disadvantaged by the 360's floaty directional pad. The left, right and up buttons once again represent Sam's respective vision modes, but the down button is now used for Sam's whistle. Too many times had I gone to change to night vision to scope out my surrounds, only to whistle and alert guards to my location. Thankfully due to the abundance of daylight and headquarters missions, where these vision modes are either unusable or unnecessary, this is less of an issue than it could have been.

Double Agent slips its way on to the next generation with ease. The gameplay as a whole is largely unchanged, but has now been given a purpose with the addition of a story and morality system that will truly make you feel for the characters and the mission at hand. The game has been given a new coat of paint and looks better than ever, but it is the changes to the mechanics, multiplayer and solo, that keeps Double Agent fresh and more balanced than ever, making it definitely worth a look for any 360 owner.