Splinter Cell Blacklist Announced

Update: Ubisoft has unleashed a gameplay video of Splinter Cell Blacklist, which shows that Sam Fisher hasn't lost his deadly touch.

Original Story: Sam Fisher came out of retirement during Microsoft’s E3 press conference in a live demo for Splinter Cell Blacklist.

The demo starts with a man dressed in Middle Eastern garb carrying a wounded man towards a checkpoint. He calls out to the wary soldiers, who direct him towards a tent. Once inside, the good samaritan drops the body on the floor and silently dispatches everyone in the tent.  He then drops his outer garments to reveal his true identity as UbiSoft’s longtime stealth expert, Sam Fisher.

The Ubisoft rep giving the demo clues us into the plot of Blacklist, along with Sam’s mission. A collection of rogue nations has created a blacklist containing the locations of terrorist attacks that will be carried out if the U.S. doesn’t pull troops out of their countries.

The demo sees Sam on the Iraq/Iran border trying to stop the next blacklist attack. In order to do so, he’ll have to interrogate a high value target. 

In a small courtyard, Sam stealthily takes out a group of soldiers, flawlessly switching between slow motion gunfire and up-close knife kills, while effortlessly sliding over cars and climbing up walls more like one of the protagonists in an Assassin’s Creed title.

In response, Sam’s enemies call in a patrol truck complete with a heavy machine gun mounted in the back. The guards spread out, but don’t fare much better. At one point Sam climbs up onto a roof and throws an unwitting guard over the ledge. When two more guards come over to inspect, he electrocutes them by shooting a shocking device into a puddle. Good to see the old dog won’t be relying completely on new tricks.

The only threat left is the truck-mounted machine gun, which shoots a stream of bullets at Sam as he runs through an abandoned home, smashing through the front door on the way in and seamlessly jumping through a window on the way out. It wouldn’t be a Microsoft demo if Splinter Cell Blacklist didn’t utilize Kinect in some trivial way, and on cue the Ubisoft rep calls in a missile to blow up the truck with a voice command. A quick door breach and a few more slow-motion kills are the only thing that stands between Sam and his target.

With all the henchmen on the floor, Sam grabs his target and asks politely for information on the next terrorist target by beating his face in a little. The man responds by saying he’s already dead, and pulls the trigger on Sam’s gun, shooting himself in the head. Looks like Sam will need a plan B.

Splinter Cell Blacklist will be released in spring 2013. We'll bring you more on the game later this week.