Splinter Cell: Blacklist Review - The Best-Playing Sam Fisher

The Last Time Sam Fisher Was at His Best

🥷 This review is part of the The Splinter Cell Series – play the stealth saga in order.

There is a moment early in Splinter Cell: Blacklist that quietly tells you everything. You drop into a guarded compound, and the game does not push you down a corridor. It hands you a rooftop, a drainage pipe, a vent, a darkened side door, and a guard patrol with a rhythm you can read. Then it steps back and waits.

That single design choice - giving the space back to the player - is why Blacklist is, mechanically, the best entry in the entire saga and, to date, the last mainline one.

For a series that spent years pulling in two directions, this was the reconciliation we had been waiting for. The purists wanted the patient, light-and-sound ghosting of Chaos Theory. The newer crowd loved the fast, aggressive, cinematic flow of Conviction. Blacklist refused to pick a side. It took the freedom of the old games and the silky movement of the new one and stitched them into a single sandbox - then let you decide who Sam Fisher is on any given mission.

At Dadnology, we rate it an honest 9/10. Not a 10 - and we will be blunt about why later. But as a thing you actually hold in your hands and play, nothing else in the series feels this good.

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Splinter Cell: Blacklist (opens in a new tab)

The mechanical peak of the series. The best-playing Sam Fisher and the last mainline entry - a stealth sandbox that rewards any approach.

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Ghost, Panther, Assault: Your Mission, Your Rules

The heart of Blacklist is a three-way scoring system that finally respected how differently people want to play a Sam Fisher game.

Ghost is the path of the saint. You move through an entire level without being seen, without raising an alarm, and ideally without leaving a single body behind. This is the Chaos Theory dream made playable in a modern engine - non-lethal takedowns, careful light management, sleeping gas, and the patience to wait three real minutes for one guard to turn his back. It is the hardest path and the most rewarding.

Panther is the predator. You stay hidden, but you kill. Silenced rounds, lethal takedowns from the dark, melting back into shadow before the body hits the floor. This is the lethal-stealth fantasy, and it feels phenomenal because the movement is so fluid - Sam flows from cover to cover, vaults, and mantles without ever fighting the controls.

Assault is the loud option. Sometimes a plan falls apart, and Blacklist does not punish you for it. The cover-shooting and gunplay are genuinely competent, so when the alarm trips, you can fight your way out instead of reloading a save in shame.

The brilliance is that all three earn you currency, which you spend on gear and upgrades. The game has an opinion - it clearly admires the Ghost - but it never forces it. That is a level of respect for the player most modern action games forgot how to show.

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Movement, Gadgets, and Mark-and-Execute

Pick up Blacklist after the older games and the first thing you feel is the movement. Conviction introduced a fluid, momentum-driven Sam, and Blacklist refined it into the best traversal the series ever had. Vaulting, sliding into cover, swinging around corners, dropping from a ledge to yank a guard over a railing - it all chains together without friction. The old games made you fight the camera and the controls; Blacklist makes you feel like the silent professional the cutscenes keep telling you that you are.

Mark-and-Execute returns and is better integrated than ever. You tag targets in real time, then trigger a stylish automatic takedown of all of them at once - but you have to earn each charge with a hands-on melee takedown first. It is a system that rewards aggression with spectacle while still asking you to engage with the stealth, and it threads the needle between the old patience and the new flash beautifully.

Then there are the gadgets, the toy box that has always defined the series. The Tri-Rotor drone scouts ahead, distracts guards, and delivers a shock. Sticky cameras snare patrols. Sleeping gas, EMPs, the classic sticky shocker, proximity mines, and a whole upgrade tree of suits and goggles let you build the loadout your playstyle demands. The trifocal goggles - the iconic three-green-dots silhouette - are back, now reading both night vision and thermal. Few games make a gear screen this fun to obsess over.

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Spies vs Mercs: The Crown Jewel Returns

If Blacklist had shipped with nothing but the campaign, it would still be a great game. But it brought back the single best thing the franchise ever invented for multiplayer: Spies vs Mercs.

For the uninitiated, this is one of the most genuinely original competitive modes in gaming history. One team plays the Spies in stealthy, agile third-person, all about positioning, shadows, and timing. The other team plays the Mercs in heavy, lethal first-person, hunting the shadows with flashlights and firepower. It is an asymmetric duel of cat and mouse where the two sides experience the same map through completely different eyes - and it is unbearably tense.

Blacklist offered two versions: a modern, gadget-heavy take with larger teams and customization, and a Classic 2v2 mode tuned to feel like the Chaos Theory original, stripped back to pure positioning. For a certain kind of player - the kind who reads this site - those late-night Classic matches are some of the most heart-pounding multiplayer ever made. There is no jump-scare in a horror game scarier than the click of a Merc’s flashlight finding you in the dark.

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The Paladin and a Full Co-op Campaign

Blacklist also gave the series a proper home base: the Paladin, a converted military aircraft that serves as your mobile HQ. Between missions you walk its decks, talk to your team, upgrade the plane itself, and pick your next contract from a world map. It is light RPG framing, but it gives the whole game a center of gravity that Conviction lacked.

Crucially, the Paladin is also where you launch the co-op campaign - a full set of dedicated missions built for two stealth operatives playing together. This is not a tacked-on horde mode. These are real, designed stealth scenarios that require communication, coordinated takedowns, and split-route planning. For two friends who both love the genre, it is some of the finest cooperative stealth content ever shipped.

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👨 The Dad Angle - Why Blacklist Fits a Father’s Schedule

Here is the honest truth about why Blacklist works so well for dads specifically: it is the most respectful Splinter Cell of your time. The mission structure is modular - you fly the Paladin, pick a contract, and play a self-contained chunk. There is no sprawling 60-hour epic demanding you remember a plot from three weeks ago. You can sit down for forty minutes after the kids are in bed, ghost one mission, and feel a complete sense of accomplishment.

The three-playstyle design also matches your energy on any given night. Got the patience and want to feel like a master? Go full Ghost and savor a perfect, undetected run. Tired and want the power fantasy? Go Panther and silently dismantle a building. Just want to blow off steam? Go loud. The game adapts to you instead of demanding you adapt to it.

And then there is Spies vs Mercs as the social hit - a mode you can jump into with a friend over voice chat once the house is quiet, no campaign commitment required. It is rated M for Mature for a reason, so this is firmly after-bedtime territory, not something to share with the kids. But as a game built around clean, satisfying sessions that respect a fractured adult schedule, very few stealth titles do it better.

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The Honest 9: Why Not a 10

We do not hand out 10s for nostalgia, and Blacklist has two real flaws that keep it short of perfection.

First, the voice. Michael Ironside had been Sam Fisher since 2002 - that dry, weary, gravel-throated wit was inseparable from the character. For Blacklist, Ubisoft recast the role with Eric Johnson to enable full performance capture. Whatever the technical justification, it was divisive, and rightly so. The new Sam is fine; he is just not the Sam. For long-time fans, every line is a small reminder that something essential was traded away.

Second, the plot is forgettable. The setup - a countdown of escalating terror attacks called the Blacklist, orchestrated by a group called the Engineers - is functional, generic, and gone from your memory the moment the credits roll. There is no equivalent to the moral weight or geopolitical bite of the best Clancy-era stories. The campaign exists to string together brilliant levels, and at that it succeeds; as a narrative, it is wallpaper.

Neither flaw touches what is actually in your hands. Mechanically, this is the series at its modern peak. But a 10 has to be perfect for what it set out to be, and a Splinter Cell game that loses its iconic voice and tells a story you forget instantly is, honestly, a 9.

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FAQ

Is Splinter Cell: Blacklist the best Splinter Cell game?

It is the best-playing one. Chaos Theory remains the purist’s masterpiece for atmosphere and tension, but Blacklist is the most mechanically refined entry. It fuses classic ghosting freedom with fluid modern movement and lets you choose your own style.

Does Sam Fisher have a different voice in Blacklist?

Yes. Michael Ironside, who voiced Sam from the original game onward, was replaced by Eric Johnson for Blacklist so Ubisoft could use full performance capture. The recast was divisive among long-time fans and remains the game’s most-debated decision.

Is Spies vs Mercs in Blacklist?

Yes. The legendary asymmetric multiplayer mode returns in two flavors: the modern Blacklist version and a Classic 2v2 mode closer to the Chaos Theory original. It pits stealthy third-person Spies against first-person Mercs and is a series highlight.

Can you play Blacklist in co-op?

Yes. Blacklist includes a full co-op campaign of dedicated missions launched from the Paladin, the mobile aircraft hub. The co-op missions are designed for two stealth operatives and are some of the best cooperative stealth content in any game.

Can I play Splinter Cell: Blacklist on modern consoles?

On Xbox the game is playable via backward compatibility on Series X and S. The PC version still runs well and is the most reliable way to play today. There is no native current-gen remaster as of 2026.