So contrary to what I said in another thread, Splinter Cell Blacklist is a pretty easy game. I'm playing on Realistic (the second highest difficulty) and I'm doing a No-Kill run meaning, obviously, that I wont kill a single hostile.
Now, what I found is, that the game is only really hard when you try to avoid the hostiles instead of trying to knock them all out and you might argue "Well, but that's the spirit of the Ghost playstyle" which is a good argument, but for me the fun in stealth games is and was always to stalk the enemies and then knock them out one by one. Just sneaking around them is not that much fun for me.
Now, what makes the game so easy (at least for me) you might ask: Well see, in the previous Splinter Cell games, especially the first three, you only had a limited amount of what I call "distance knock out weapons". If I remember correctly (which I don't guarantee) you could carry about 3 sticky shocks and 3 plastic discs with you to stun enemies from a distance (with the plastic discs you needed a headshot to actually knock enemies out) but in Blacklist I'm carrying around 15 cartridges of sleeping gas, which can knock out multiple enemies at once, and 15 electric bolts. And I'm not even mentioning the drone that can shock enemies and the weird shock-mine. So overall with full ammunition I can take out at least 38 guys quietly. Furthermore, there are supply drops everywhere which allow you to restock ammo should you ever run out, which is never the case if you attempt to play stealthy cause you have to make sure that every shot hits.
I do realise that it is completely up to me how much I use these devices but it still kills a lot of the tention for me. I remember in the first games I was always scared to use one of my items because I thought I might really need it later so I used them really, really carefully and sparsely.
I'm not doing a "no-kill run" because I emphasize with all those lovely NPCs out there but because it would be far too easy to just sit in the dark and snipe them all one by one, which is exactly what you can do in Blacklist which is a shame cause the game is (despite all that) pretty good.
Last thing I want to say is, that I know that this sounds like an extremly elitist thing to say but if there is actually one thing where I would call myself an elitist it's stealth games so it's probably justified. So if you are a bit like me and love stealth, no kill runs etc maybe keep this in mind. Overall it's not a bad game (although the controls can be pretty bad sometimes. I've closed at least 5 doors when I actually wanted to take out the guy behind them cause the game handels multiple possible actions pretty bad) but it's also not really a very good stealth game. Still, a big step up from the mess that was Conviction.
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