Before I start ranting about Splinter Cell: Double Agent, let me first set the stage. I really enjoyed the previous parts of the Splinter Cell franchise, namely Splinter Cell, Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. They all had minor flaws and glitches, but I never encountered any serious problems. Thus, the next part Splinter Cell: Double Agent seemed to be a sure bet and I couldn't wait to get my hands on it.

So, there I was with my freshly purchased copy of the game and a quite decent gaming rig by the standards of the time. First, the installation: no major problems there. Then, I started the training mission. The game's protagonist Sam Fisher was standing in a white room and I had a list of objectives to accomplish. The only problem: there was absolutely nothing in this room. It was completely white. I couldn't even tell whether there were any walls. After I had wandered around aimlessly for some time, I decided that this was pointless and consulted several gaming forums. As it turned out, the default video settings didn't harmonize too well with my hardware. That's a good start, right? However, after some tedious adjustments the level architecture finally became visible... well, sort of. The graphics were still quite blurry and navigating through the level felt a bit awkward, but at least I could see where I was headed.

So much for my initial acquaintance with Splinter Cell: Double Agent. Lets have a closer look at certain aspects of the game. First, the gameplay. This is quite different compared to the predecessors. As the game's title indicates, Sam is acting as a double agent and can work for both the government and the terrorists. Your actions and decisions affect the extend to which either side is trusting you. Another innovation are the numerous daylight missions. In the previous parts, melting with the shadows was a key element of the gameplay. The new daylight levels with hardly any dark spots, on the other hand, require a different approach and may take some getting used to. Personally, I preferred the old style. Nonetheless, Splinter Cell: Double Agent could have been a great game if it wasn't for the countless annoying bugs that leech every last bit of fun from it. Lets elaborate on this issue.

Getting stuck
This seems to be the bread-and-butter bug. Since there are rarely any dark spots to hide in, you take whatever cover you get: crates, pipes, pillars, you name it. Of course, you can't stay in a given spot for too long because your enemies are constantly moving. The prime example is to avoid being spotted by a patrolling guard by constantly keeping an obstacle in the line of sight. So, you are circling this crate or whatever when suddenly you get stuck for no apparent reason. You can no longer move although there is nothing in your way. To cut a long story short, you're done for. Play it again, Sam! (Sorry for the overused quote) Although being annoying, this problem wouldn't be such a big deal if it only occurred sporadically. But instead, getting stuck is a constant source of frustration. My favorite incident was when I dropped from the roof of a bus to take cover behind the vehicle and suddenly found myself frozen in midair. I could still rotate the hovering Sam but nothing more. Priceless!

Denial of basic movements
There are countless occasions in the game when you try to sneak past guards or enemies that are well within earshot. Since upright walking, even on the lowest speed setting, will almost certainly attract their attention, you try crouching to reduce the noise level. I deliberately say "try" because often Sam refuses to do so for no reason. This bug is extremely annoying, but hey: only makes the game more challenging, right?

Data loss
Every now and then, the game "lost" the savegames from a properly ended previous session. This bug only occurred infrequently and I haven't managed to derive an underlying pattern. Another thing that bothers me is that you lose all the intermediate auto saves for a given level once you completed it. Perhaps it's not a bug but a feature. Who knows?

The safe cracking minigame
In the previous Splinter Cell parts there have already been minigames for lockpicking and hacking. Now, there is a new one for opening safes. To do so, you have to rotate three cylinders, each having a small gap in it. Your goal is to align the gaps with a rod at the top. The spinning speed of the cylinders can be adjusted almost steplessly in the same way as Sam's walking speed. So much for the theory. However, due to a bug in the PC version of the game, there are actually only two available settings for the spinning speed: zero and maximum. So, if you enter the minigame with a walking speed below the maximum, the cylinders won't respond at all. This can be quite irritating if it's your first time opening a safe and you didn't have the patience to thoroughly read the manual in the first place. Once you figured that out, you will still have a hard time lining up those cylinders. They spin like dervishes and if you rotate the current cylinder too far you will also move the previously aligned cylinders again. To make things worse, the game designers saw to it that you never have the necessary time to open a safe with care and patience. So, have fun! I sure didn't.

The menu movies
This isn't really a bug but it's equally annoying. Someone obviously deemed it to be a great idea to spice up the menu with some movies. More eye candy? That's OK with me. As long as it doesn't interfere with the usability. In case of the in-menu movies, this would mean that I am given the possibility to cancel a movie at will. Well, there is no such option. Every time you quit a mission and want to go back to the main menu, the game forces you to sit through the same 10-second movie and you can't do squat. Mark my words: EVERY... SINGLE... TIME!

Game crashes
At some point in the last third of the game, the saving function went completely nuts. Henceforth, each attempt to save the current game resulted in an immediate crash. No BSOD, no error message, nothing. Considering the fact that all the other bugs literally force frequent saving, I finally decided to screw this game.

Conclusion
Despite all the aforementioned problems, I fought my way thus far, although I have to admit that I was constantly raging and swearing like a trooper in doing so. But those save-crashes were the last straw. I've had it with this game! According to rumors, the XBox version is not as bug-infested. Apparently, it was developed first and then ported to the PC. That is surely comforting for all the XBox owners out there, but a fat lot of use that is to me as a PC owner. Well, expectations were high... so was my blood pressure.