Ubisoft hits the mark again with stealth shooter 'Conviction'

Agent Sam Fisher returns with a chip on his shoulder in "Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction," a fast-paced covert ops game that rewards stealth sneaking over overt shooting.

The sixth "Splinter Cell" installment is a cinematic adventure with few breaks in the action. Sam, aptly voiced by actor Michael Ironside, sneaks along pipes and ledges, climbs walls, and springs and rolls between cover positions before taking out enemies with a growing arsenal of guns and cool hand-to-hand combat moves.

The game is set a few years after the last "Splinter Cell" game, and Sam is mad.

His Third Echelon agency forced him to assassinate his best friend Irving Lambert, and a drunken driver has killed his daughter Sarah, "the only thing that humanized him."

Sam is essentially out of the spy business, but when he hears that his daughter's death might not have been an accident, he heads to Malta to hunt down her killer.

The game's scenes look spectacular, and they sport some interesting effects.

Environments appear in color when Sam is moving around overtly, but they switch to a darkened black-and-white mode when he's stealthy.

And walls can double as video screens for clips to provide background story or message boards showing helpful commands such as "climb," "cover" or "interrogate." At first they reminded me of the 3-D text in the movie "Zombieland," but they proved helpful yet noninvasive after a few scenes.

The game's cover system works well, and once in position, you can move Sam from cover spot to cover spot by hitting the A button.

And if you're moving Sam around between those spots while shooting, the game leaves a silhouette to mark his last known position. That'll be where the enemies are most likely targeting, which allows Sam to sneak over to a different cover spot and gain a better angle for kills.

One of my favorite features is the new "mark and execute" move.

You earn one of these by completing a hand-to-hand enemy takedown, and it allows you to tag up to four enemies then hit the Y button for guaranteed kills. There are often more than a few enemies in any area, so all it does is get you off to a good start before the real gunfire begins.

"Splinter Cell: Conviction" offers a completely different game in co-op mode, putting players in the characters of Agent Archer, an American, and Agent Kestrel, a Russian, with a mission to find weapons. The two can team up in split-screen, multiple Xbox 360 systems or online.

The pace of both the single-player and co-op games moves fast, but there are a few other modes to explore. Deniable Ops tasks players with eliminating all the enemies in an area or defending an EMP generator against hordes of bad guys. Both are also offered in online mode, with some additional head-to-head features.