Splinter Cell Essentials screenshot salvo

We've extracted some new images from Splinter Cell Essentials, Ubisoft's PSP outing for everyone's favorite gravel-voiced agent, Sam Fisher.

Spanning Sam's colorful and shadow-packed past, Essentials steps in to explain much of the story behind the delayed Splinter Cell Double Agent.

The action kicks off after Fisher's daughter Sarah has died, and Splinter Cell Essentials finds the black-ops member working alongside a group of terrorists... or so it would seem. Seized by shady government agency Third Echelon - his former employers - Sam attempts to explain his actions, taking us back into his sneaky past.

Each level of Essentials will uncover new details behind Sam's motives, from his early missions as a Navy SEAL in 1992, and operations between Pandora Tomorrow and Chaos Theory right up to Sarah's death in 2008.

With Splinter Cell Double Agent's release date in question, we're hoping the fresh new missions in Splinter Cell Essentials will keep our spy-senses sharp. Expect to hear more on this PSP stealth-o-rama soon.

February 22, 2006

Ben Richardson is a former Staff Writer for Official PlayStation 2 magazine and a former Content Editor of GamesRadar+. In the years since Ben left GR, he has worked as a columnist, communications officer, charity coach, and podcast host – but we still look back to his news stories from time to time, they are a window into a different era of video games.