Also on display was Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Ubisoft's continuation of the style of gameplay first started with Conviction. Sam is back and is now the leader of Fourth Echelon, and he is hunting down a new terror cell. In our presentation of the game, Sam is operating in an area on the border between Iran and Iraq, sneaking his way through a city filled with enemies as he tries to get some answers from a man who was found in a massive building near the city center.

After cutting into a tent on the outskirts of the city, Sam is able to sneak inside and scope out the situation. A hapless enemy is grabbed and dragged into the tent before being dispatched, allowing Sam to spend more time scoping out the situation. Just like as it was in Conviction, Sam can mark a series of targets before running out of the tent and shooting them all, complete with the camera panning around and slow-motion effects for each one. The developers wanted to emphasize killing in motion, and it was certainly apparent as Sam tore through the small group of tents.

Once in the city, Sam uses one of his gadgets, a sonar tool that temporarily shows the location of nearby enemy soldiers through solid walls. He climbs up on a rooftop before silently killing a guard stationed there and tossing his body. After whistling to get the attention of nearby guards, Sam proceeds to shoot a shock dart into a puddle they're standing in to electrocute them both. Unfortunately, there's also a technical to deal with at the end of the road before Sam can proceed into the city center. Using the power that comes with being the leader of the Fourth Echelon, he authorizes and calls in an airstrike that blows apart the technical and allows him to proceed.

Once near his target, Sam rigs a door to explode and then makes his entrance through a window on the second floor as he sets off the explosives to take out a fair amount of the enemies. After dealing with them, Sam turns his attention to his target, who first hides behind his status as a deep-cover MI6 agent before Grimm runs his authentication codes and finds them to have been revoked a long time ago. Before Sam can get much more info from the man, he shoots himself, leaving Sam to fight his way out of the veritable beehive of enemies. To man his escape, Sam controls a UAV flying overhead, using its machine gun to kill enemies that are trying to kick down the door and the antiair batteries that prevent his escape via helicopter.

The gameplay looked a lot like what it was in Conviction, which may continue to upset fans who preferred the gameplay of the older games in the series. However, the tools and gameplay elements at Sam's disposal certainly make it look more like a Splinter Cell game, and though there's a lot of shooting , there was also a pretty heavy emphasis during the presentation on stealth and the use of tools, such as the door cam. Regardless, all will be revealed when the game is released in the spring of next year.