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Ubisoft

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Blacklist A new Sam Fisher game from Ubisoft Toronto.

Torture has long been an element in Splinter Cell games. This long-running series stars the fictional Sam Fisher as that spy. He's an unsmiling, elite agent with the backing of the National Security Agency who typically dresses in black, drops from ceilings to snap necks and dispatches guards with a silenced pistol.

In these games, torture tends to secure information that might stop a coming catastrophe. Notably, because Blacklist is a video game, the few moments of torture are not interactive. They pass fleetingly and mostly run like a movie. In the folding-chair scene, the game player is given one point of manipulation: choosing whether to spare or kill the man.

The vivid scene is special because of where it is set: a cell in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. And that makes Blacklist the first big-budget game to go there, to show players a digital version of Gitmo's cages and dogs. In the lead-up to the interrogation, we see a generic prisoner in an orange jumpsuit, his head covered with a hood, pushed to the ground by his American captors. The educated gamer has to infer that he might be a terrorist. There's no sign of a hunger strike.

It's all just for show. There's nothing to play until the interrogation ends and Fisher, information secured, must escape. Once that part begins, Fisher is in a new part of the Guantánamo Bay complex, where there are no prisoners or anything else with any political charge. There are just the American guards that he is trying to avoid — they couldn't possibly understand his sensitive mission — and a camp full of hiding spaces and shadows. It's on the player to use the geometry of the camp to sneak out, to know when to run, what to climb and how to leave as little trace as possible.

In the Guantánamo Bay torture scene, and in mission after mission, Blacklist seems to be on the brink of saying something challenging about the war on terror. And then it appears to retreat, falling back on a simple narrative of bad guys and American heroes. Its failure to say more is unsurprising. The lack of sophistication in big-budget game narratives remains outpaced by the sophistication of gameplay. The storytelling in Blacklist and many other games is non-interactive and arguably a distraction; the play tends to be what engages fingers and brains.

The story in Blacklist just doesn't amount to much beyond being timely. By the end, the game has brought its hero through global hot spots, from a mission to liberate a prisoner in a Benghazi, Libya, safe house to one that sends him into the former United States Embassy in Tehran. Again and again, it names its potent locale, flexes some American muscle and moves on.

Fortunately, what you can do in Splinter Cell remains interesting, challenging and stimulating. This is a spy game, as the series has been since its 2002 inception. It is, at its core, a complex rendering of floors, walls, ceilings, lights and shadows, and an opportunity for a player to use a controller or a mouse and keyboard to guide a man through those shadows.

Slipping through undetected, without alerting patrolling enemies, without a single act of violence, remains the path most rewarded. It's the most exciting and scores the most points. Lazier players will use machine guns. Experts won't hurt a fly, learning to sneak through missions with a friend in cooperative mode and seeking the most challenging and blissfully plot-free excursions that require Fisher to remain undetected from beginning to end.

A moral about the virtues of diminished violence, of a small American footprint and of avoiding collateral damage might emerge in this game. Those ideas are a byproduct of game design, not of any grafted-on story. The less story, the better, in this production. Blacklist is at its best in portions like its spies-versus-mercenaries multiplayer mode, a competitive trial of tactical combat.

Blacklist repeatedly squanders the power of video games to enable players to explore virtually real-world spaces they're unlikely to ever visit. Each dangerous place is mere set-dressing for interactive hiding, stalking and escaping. Fortunately, that cat-and-mouse action is rewarding. The gameplay is as subtle and nuanced as Blacklist's overblown plot is not.

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Blacklist, developed by Ubisoft Toronto for PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Wii U, is Rated M (Mature) for intense violence and strong language.