The good news:
From the limited portion of the game I have been able to play, the game looks good, slightly better than the already impressive first Splinter Cell. It has some new visual effect tweaks here and there and a few new moves for the main character, and overall has a solid, current, but not spectacular appearance. The game environment seems to have gained some improvements in interactivity as well, with some neat features like your footsteps scaring birds out of the grass and your character casting shadows when passing in front of a projector screen added to spice things up.

As with Splinter Cell, the voice acting is good, the story is well put together, and the settings and cut scenes are professional. It is clear the designers did their homework. While I haven't had the pleasure of finishing much of the game (I'll get into why in a moment), the game has the goods.

If only it could actually deliver them.

The bad news:
My system well exceeds all the requirements and has all the latest drivers, but this game can't seem to stabilize even with the v1.1 patch installed. Frustratingly, I experienced crashes about every three minutes of gameplay in single player. These seemed to be triggered by almost all the scripted events (and there are lots - which would be good if they didn't kill the game) and each time I moved from a portion of level to another portion. All of the crashes required a reboot to be able to get the game to run again, and several of them hard hung my system - relatively uncommon on my Windows XP box. Since the game frequently autosaves for you (this is a good thing) it's not quite as bad as it could be to crash, but it's still not good at all.

The multiplayer game is more stable and doesn't appear to crash when switching maps or during play. This is good because Splinter Cell: Pandora Tommorrow has an inventive multiplayer mode where your point of view, equipment, objectives, and method of operating are quite different depending on which side you play (reminiscent of Aliens vs. Predator). However, I was inexplicably blocked from playing in multiplayer mode about three-fourths of the times I ran the game due to bad punkbuster detection; even though I had the punkbuster software installed and enabled I was stilled banned from joining servers for not having punkbuster. This problem, like the rest, only seemed to resolve itself when I rebooted my system. UbiSoft has clearly set its priorities on getting multiplayer working first, however, as almost all the updates in the latest patch are aimed at the multiplayer mode.

One thing I found odd was the multiplayer game has the same basic look and feel as the single player, but plays almost like a different game. Although the two modes share models, animations, and visual effects, I would bet that UbiSoft designed the multiplayer mode as a seperate design project. The key commands are mostly different from the single player (even though most of the character's actions are the same). The character also interacts a little differently with the game envirnonment, so it takes some getting used to.

The bottom line:
This title will probably be worth the price of admission if and when the stability problems are corrected. The game in its present state runs like an early beta test version, and as happens time and time again in the software industry, it is clear that the game was pushed out before it was ready. Buyer beware; wait for UbiSoft to spend the time - as it should have before release - to fix the game with further updates before you spend your money on this game. Afterward, this game will most likely be a good entertainment value.