Playing "Splinter Cell: Blacklist" offers feelings that were both foreign and familiar. Playing the game, I had a sense that I had been here before, long ago, but that the experience was new and refreshing. "Splinter Cell: Blacklist" evokes these feelings because it is, quite honestly, the perfect hybrid of what made the original "Splinter Cell" so great while still keeping relevant in today's changing gaming culture.Die hard fans of "Splinter Cell" want their "Splinter Cell" to be fairly simple. I am silent. I am deadly, but I do my job best when I move through this environment with full deniability. I have a Fifth Freedom, but this is the freedom to not take a life inasmuch as it is to end a life. "Splinter Cell" accommodates this in many ways. What it also accommodates is the modern mindset of pure reckless abandon; chaos with an iron fist. The ability to rush a level and let pure shooter skill decide who is left standing. You can do this too in "Splinter Cell" and...oddly enough... it never betrays itself.The game performs this very delicate balancing act a few ways. The first is the game's campaign has each mission (and there are more than expected) playable in one of 3 methods. "Ghost" (which has players being unseen/detected and using non-lethal methods), "Panther" (Unseen but exceptionally deadly), and "Assault" (Go loud... there are no survivors.) You can select gear in an almost RPG fash.