Venturing forth ... secretly

Two years after his debut, Pandora Tomorrow marks the second appearance of Sam Fisher, who once again has to put a stop to evil villains as an agent of Third Echelon, a top-secret subdivision of the NSA. This time it's off to Indonesia for the man with the jaw for a knockout blow, where he has to neutralize a military leader who has come into possession of a biological warfare agent - so far, so classic.

The score

Instead, the man at the helm of the music department has been replaced, and instead of Michael Richard Plowman, someone else is pulling the strings. Who exactly? Well, as is so often the case, the internet is not in agreement due to a lack of an official release. Here I'll just go with the Splinter Cell-Fanwiki, which speaks of a joint composition by the trio of Jack Wall (cutscenes), Guy Dubuc and Marc Lessard (in-game). The main theme, on the other hand, was composed by Lalo Schifrin, a five-time Emmy winner who is more at home in television and, among other things, came up with the iconic Mission Impossible-Melodie erdachte. Von der Erwartung einer Komposition von ähnlich mitreißendem Charakter wie der Tom-Cruise-Mucke müssen wir derweil leider Abstand nehmen – und das nicht, weil Schifrin nur das recht mittelmäßige Main Menu3 beigesteuert hat.

Other entries in the Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell -series

Soundtrack

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell (2002)

Soundtrack

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow (2004)

Soundtrack

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (2005)

As with its predecessor, the gamerip for Pandora Tomorrow is entertaining. Although the change in composers has brought a little more variation to the ambient soundscape, the score is still not really exciting. Due to the nature of a gamerip, the 39 tracks have a similar length - mostly around 1.5 minutes - and are named according to the levels. Songs such as Jungle Standard 1-4 are more of a single piece than individual tracks. Unlike its predecessor, the album divides the songs not just into Stress and Fight , but Standard, Suspicion and Fight. This creates a natural increase in tension towards the end of a set piece, which is why the techno-like and action-packed Fight-songs come off better in my opinion than the calmer Standard-tracks.

Compared to its predecessor, the areas sound even more different, albeit still stereotypical: the Jerusalem track in particular feels familiar to us from various Middle East shooters or the first Assassin’s Creed, whereas Jungle and Submarine have a Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater-/Predator atmosphere thanks to the use of the panpipe. Criogenics, on the other hand, is almost psychedelic.

The soundtrack offers an interesting mix in its own right, but once again remains devoid of identity. Meanwhile, the density of things to listen to increases. In particular, the addition of strings such as cellos in tracks like Submarine Suspicion4 or Submarine Fight4 provides a pleasantly profound antithesis to the upbeat techno on the surface. Musically, the heated shoot-outs with the henchmen meet the cool composure of the experienced secret agent. Even if there was nothing here for me yet, the course taken is absolutely right and should be further explored in the later parts of the series.