Sam Fisher has changed a lot since you last saw him at the end of Splinter Cell: Double Agent. Mostly, he’s just really pissed off. In Conviction, he’s on a personal mission to track down and kill the people who murdered his daughter.

We played through two separate areas of the game – the first is an interactive cut-scene where, instead of just watching the interrogation, you take control of it and beat the information out of your unwilling informant any way you see fit. We smashed his head on a urinal, then put it through a mirror before – information delivered – shooting him in the head.

Then it was on to the well-guarded building we’d been directed to. It’s there that Splinter Cell showed its true genius – your target’s inside, there are guards all around, how you deal with it is completely up to you. We took the stealthy approach. Or, at least, we tried to. Bungling our first kill, the body was spotted by the passer-bys and the guards were put on high alert.

Wiping out everyone who’d actually laid eyes on us, a ghostly image of our last-known position handily pops up for us on screen. This becomes a helpful hint for us to get as far away as possible as the rest of the enemies rush to search that area, allowing us to pick them off from a distance.

You can also peek under doors before you enter a room – handy for teeing up another new feature where you mark targets for multiple kills at the push of a button. But you can’t do that every time – you have to complete close-up kills to unlock the skill. So it’s not an easy way out – you really have to earn Sam Fisher’s revenge.

Splinter Cell: Conviction is out on Xbox 360 and PS3 in February. Watch the trailer below.