You return to the role of Sam Fisher, the grizzled covert agent with a perma-squint and just enough stubble to achieve that rogue vibe without looking like a goddamn hippie. Fisher’s story is a dizzying sequence of betrayals and triple-crosses that sends him creeping through enemy outposts around the globe and culminates, like any good terrorist-killing yarn, in a White House siege. The experience is seamless. There are practically no loading screens, and instead of dialogue boxes, text directives are projected onto the environment itself—an effect out of a high-end stage production.
If Conviction were indeed legit theater, it would be an improv show. The game encourages ad-libbing with a panoply of weapons, gadgets, and strategies. Players are unlikely to play any stretch the same way twice. The most notable new tactic is “mark and execute.” If you complete a risky hand-to-hand kill, you gain the one-time ability to tag nearby enemies, and once you’re in position, assassinate them with a 100-percent accurate flurry of gunfire. That’s the marquee feature, but there are other masterful design strokes, like Last Known Position, a silhouette that shows where the bad guys think you are, setting up elaborate cat-and-mouse gambits which are especially rewarding in co-op play.
About the only missteps are the interrogations, all of which follow this sequence: “I’m not telling you anything, Fisher!”—biff! pow!—“Okay, I’ll tell you everything!” The press-B-to-bash-hostage’s-head-into-a-mirror feature must exist to humor the delusions of “enhanced interrogation” proponents, as it’s tedium in practice. In spite of Ubisoft’s pre-release hype, though, the torture scenes are rare and inconsequential; they don’t ruin the game’s tense excitement. Conviction never apologizes for its power fantasies, and most of the time, that works in its favor.
