Gene Park plays Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, and really, really admires it:
"The goal of the videogame stealth genre is to create a character so able and sneaky that the player feels empowered by avoiding conflict rather than initiating it. That leaves the developer with the daunting task of assigning a bevy of sneaky moves—climbing, hanging, crawling—to just a few buttons. Often times games that have brief stealth segments fail miserably, but on its maiden Xbox voyage, Ubisoft Montreal's Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell series got it mostly right. National Security Agency spy Sam Fisher has always has been athletic, able, and a joy to control, (and even sexy) as he slinks up ledges with upper-body strength to die for."
The rest of his comments can be found
here.
Honestly there was one thing I neglected to mention. I felt a few of the levels were a bit of a throwback to the older, restricted levels, notably the first level, penthouse level and the Seoul level. That's probably where I felt less inclined to score it even higher. But all of those levels are still great in their own right, and not nearly enough to punish the game.
Linear Mode
