Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell is a series of stealth shooter games, the first of which was released in 2002, and their tie-in novels. The protagonist, Sam Fisher, is a highly trained agent of a fictional black-ops sub-division within the NSA, dubbed “Third Echelon”. The player controls Fisher to overcome his adversaries in levels created using Unreal Engine and emphasising light and darkness as gameplay elements.
All the console and PC games in the series were positively received, and the series is commercially successful. The series, along with Assassin’s Creed, is considered to be one of Ubisoft’s flagship franchises,1 selling more than 31 million copies as of 2011.2
Pandora Tomorrow was developed by Ubisoft Shanghai and Ubisoft Milan and introduced multiplayer gameplay to the Splinter Cell series. In single-player mode, the game AI adapts to adjust to the player’s skill level. Unlike other games in the series,
which generally lean towards information-based threats, the plot of Pandora Tomorrow focuses on biological warfare, in which an Indonesian terrorist group threatens to infect people with smallpox virus. Sam Fisher is also given new abilities like SWAT turns and whistling to attract enemies’ attention.