The Fragdolls were out to showcase and promote Double Agent. I was among those lucky enough to be randomly chosen to come up and help. Let me state this: I almost never play first-person shooters and I have never played any of the Splinter Cell games. That said, Fragdoll Jinx did a great job at explaining the controls to me and putting up with the fact that the other guy chosen and I were not the best teammates. First, we played as the spies. Fans of the series know what that means, but to help those who don’t, you’ll appreciate my first comment to Jinx: “Where’s my gun?”

The spies don’t get guns. They’re sneaky. The get access to hidey-holes, trap doors, elevated catwalks, wires to swing from or slide down and the ability to snap someone’s neck. That last point, of course, presumes a lot more talent and sneakiness than I had. My best bet when encountering a mercenary was to run fast, run far and duck the hell under something. Which proved to be a lot of fun. I was easily confused by the level layout, but that got better the more I played.

For the first map, the spies were instructed to download two full files and return them to base, while the mercenaries were to stop them from doing such a thing. The game was relatively intuitive once you got into it. I liked sneaking around. I enjoyed shooting out the lights, so that the mercs couldn’t see me. It was very easy to switch between different visual modes, including night vision and thermal vision, so that the spies could sneak around and avoid the mercs. Shooting out the lights was a major benefit to the spies, though the mercs did have some counters to it. Shooting out the lights, hacking the stations, destroying windows and other events that changed the map were easily done via the A button.