Ubisoft have released an incredibly brief trailer for the upcoming Splinter Cell: Blacklist. So brief in fact, that I would hesitate to call it a trailer. It's more of a teaser, or extremely focused glimpse at one single aspect of game play.

The gist of things is that, in an effort to appease the naysayers, who said that this newest Splinter Cell outing looked even less like classic Splinter Cell than Conviction was, they have added in the classic night vision goggles back into Sam Fisher's arsenal. What follows is a minute long (once you get past the company's intro) piece of footage of Fisher sneaking around in the dark using his goggles. Yeah that's pretty much it.

But let's talk Splinter Cell: Blacklist in general for a moment. When it was first announced with this game play trailer back in June of last year, a lot of people, myself included, were left feeling just a tad confused. It was set in a generic Middle East-type setting (The Middle East/Iraq War level was the worst part of the previous Splinter Cell: Conviction), it featured little in the way of stealth and more in the way of explosions and generic military shooter-isms and, perhaps most importantly, Sam had a completely different voice.. No more of the brilliant Michael Ironside voice from the previous games.

There was also a new focus in that trailer of 'Killing in motion', or, making Sam agile and able to perform executions on the move. Despite the fact that Fisher, in Conviction, was already leaning towards the old man side. Sam's story was wrapped up very nicely in Conviction, I felt, so to me it would make more sense if in Blacklist, you played as a new agent with Sam as a mentor type figure. This would solve the problem of Sam not being voiced by the guy who did it for the previous five games, plus it would make sense in the context of Sam not being an old bastard.

But I digress, it's their game and if they want to go all gung ho in the Middle East, then they're welcome to catch that train. And still, they haven't shown off all that much of the game yet, so in my mind there is hope yet.