Ubisoft walks through the Abandoned Mill in Splinter Cell: Blacklist

20130117193401!Splinter_Cell_Blacklist_coverUbisoft has released a video highlighting the three different play styles of Sam Fisher in Splinter Cell: Blacklist, due to hit August 20th of this year. The video, a solid nine minutes, shows off not only the different play styles, but also the beauty of the game, the variety in lighting and textures, as well as the new fluid movement of Sam and his enemies.

The video is the first new run of the game we’ve seen since E3 2012’s demo of killing in motion and Sam’s Kinect integration. We catch a glimpse of the new near-silent tri-copter, a new hovering reconnaissance drone Sam uses to get into hard to reach areas. We can also glean a few other hints about the game from this trailer than it actively reveals, however.

First, the game is starting to look a bit dated. Sure, it’s running on a platform that is nearly a decade old at this point, but Halo 4 looked worlds better than Splinter Cell and you could argue that the slow-movement of the character will give gamers more of a chance to stop and look at everything, so it should be nothing short of perfect.

Second, the game is running at 720p resolution, not 1080p. This is a bit disheartening because of what both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 are capable of producing, and there really is just no excuse not to go fully high-definition at this point. The aforementioned Halo 4 was 1080p and widely regarded as one of the best looking games of this generation, and seldom, if ever, had any sort of framerate issues.

With that said, Splinter Cell: Blacklist does still look gorgeous and while it isn’t the best looking game ever, maybe it doesn’t need to be. What Ubisoft has done for the stealth genre in the past, it continues to do to this day: innovate. The game looks to bring a new wealth of play styles to an otherwise linear game, and while we don’t know just how much choice you’ll have in Blacklist, it seems that Ubisoft Toronto is doing its best to give you options.

Take a look at the trailer below and look out for more Splinter Cell: Blacklist on Eggplante soon!