We don’t envy the Splinter Cell Double Agent team at Ubisoft Shanghai. Following up on Ubisoft Montreal’s widely beloved Chaos Theory must be at least a little intimidating, almost like the videogame equivalent of having U2 open for your band.

So the Shanghai crew deserves a lot of credit for having the stones to tackle that challenge head-on. Its previous series effort, Pandora Tomorrow, played it safe with a solid single-player campaign that took few chances but was executed rather well. Double Agent, on the other hand, abandons almost every established Splinter Cell convention and takes bold steps into the daylight (quite literally). Does it succeed? Not entirely. It returns to the same core stealth gameplay we all know and love and earns huge points for refusing to be stricken by sequelitis. But it also leaves a lot of unfulfilled potential on the table.

Risk #1 is with Sam Fisher himself. He’s always been a straight-laced (though perennially sarcastic) good guy, but Double Agent tries to give Sam an edge by taking away everything he has to live for: his daughter. When she’s killed in a drunk-driving accident, Sam has a breakdown and takes the most dangerous assignment available: being thrown into prison to befriend a high-ranking terrorist with the goal of infiltrating and destroying his cell from within.

Unfortunately, we’re never made to feel Sam’s pain — his fragile emotional state is never really conveyed to us. We witness Sarah’s death in literally a split-second cutscene, but we don’t truly see it affect our hero. Therefore, the decisions Sam faces during the campaign aren’t as difficult as they were probably intended to be. We’re never convinced that Sam could be bad, so the “evil” choices are never very tempting. Equally lamentable is that, despite this deeply personal premise, Michael Ironside is woefully underused as Fisher after a brilliant turn in Chaos Theory in which he brought the character to another level via smart dialogue and enlightening character development.

And even if you do decide to get nasty, events don’t really play out much differently. The heralded “trust meter” that’s supposed to heavily influence your playtime never truly matters. Complete a terrorist objective and you lose NSA trust, and vice versa, but as long as you keep both afloat it’s never Game Over.

Nevertheless, a lot of what’s new in Double Agent is truly compelling. Introducing daytime missions makes Splinter Cell a whole new world. It’s harder than previous Splinters — maybe because you don’t have a tangible, shadowy “safe zone” to hide in — but never frustratingly so. During missions inside terrorist headquarters, for instance, you’ll need to sneak into where you’re not allowed to be, but you can’t risk blowing your cover by knocking out or killing anyone. As a result, you’ll be doing a lot of tense, exciting spy work, including scanning fingerprints off coffee mugs with terrorists just a few feet away, rummaging through filing cabinets with only a few seconds before someone returns, and even hiding in lockers à la Metal Gear Solid.

After you complete the solid-if-undercooked solo storyline, you must fire up the retooled Versus multiplayer mode. What was a genius but unforgiving hardcore four-player romp in Pandora Tomorrow and Chaos Theory is now a perfected three-on-three stealth masterpiece. In upping the player count and making key gameplay changes — such as removing most gadgets and merging all of the spies’ abilities (light-disabling, lockpicking, and hacking) into their armband computers — this brilliant matchup of third-person spies against first-person mercenaries is now more about strategy and stealth than neck-snapping shenanigans that only pros can keep up with.

It’s also more fairly balanced than ever. Spies are quicker and more nimble, for instance, but mercs can rappel down from high catwalks with a press of the A button. On top of it all, each of the eight maps is a gem, highlighted by the stellar “Boss House” and the intricate “USS Wisdom.” And to help ease in new folks, in-game ghosts and a useful on-screen map help you get where you’re going. Heck, there are even convincing bots to round out games if you’re short a merc or two.

Even though this is our lowest-scoring Splinter Cell ever, you absolutely have to play it. The 9.0 score and Editors’ Choice award should make that clear. Just think of Double Agent as the least amazing Splinter Cell yet, rather than the worst game in the series — because it’s simply not. It’s the gutsiest, and the chances it takes (but doesn’t quite nail) give the series room to evolve into something better than anything we could’ve possibly imagined two iterations ago. How many revered, long-running franchises can still say that?

On Xbox 360

+ Multiplayer is phenomenal.

+ Single-player takes a lot of chances…

- …Though it doesn’t make the most of them.

? Why is the amazing co-op mode from the original-Xbox version not here?

9.0