Splinter Cell: Blacklist trailer pits Spies against their natural enemy, the Merc

The Merc and the Spy have been bitter enemies ever since the former neglected to hold a door open for the latter sometime in the late eighteenth century. That one act of (quite unforgivable) rudeness sparked a centuries-long feud, escalating through name-calling, to pranks, and inevitably to murder . After sitting Conviction out, the pair are at it again, in Splinter Cell: Blacklist's returning Spies vs. Mercs multiplayer mode. IGN have a video of the celebrated mode's grand reveal, and after crawling through an air-duct with a pair of night-vision goggles on, so do we. See it in action after the break.

If you can't quite cast your mind back to 2006 and to Splinter Cell: Double Agent, when Spies vs. Mercs last appeared, it's an asynchronous multiplayer mode pitting a team of Spies (sneaky, stealthy) against a team of Mercenaries (heavily armoured, and packing heat). Here the former are tasked with infiltrating and hacking terminals, while the latter are employed to guard them. You can probably imagine how that's going to pan out.

In previous games, Spies vs. Mercs was either a two-on-two or three-on-three type deal, but that's been upped to four-on-four in Blacklist. As you can see, it all looks very exciting - I'm looking forward to getting stuck in. Sam Fisher's latest jaunt is due on the 20th of August in the US, and the 22nd in Europe. I'm willing to be bet there will be more trailers in the meantime.

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Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.