‘Splinter Cell’ fans praise Netflix animated series ‘Deathwatch’: “It has so much sauce”

Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Deathwatch has launched on Netflix and gamers are loving the animated adaptation.

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Action-adventure stealth game Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell was released in 2002 and introduced gamers to highly trained secret agent Sam Fisher. A number of sequels followed and as of 2016, 32million Splinter Cell games have been sold. However the most recent entry in the franchise was 2013’s Blacklist although a remake of the original was released in 2021.

Yesterday (October 14) an animated adaptation of Splinter Cell launched on Netflix, written by John Wick creator Derek Kolstad. “In this first-ever adaptation of the acclaimed stealth video game Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, legendary agent Sam Fisher is drawn back into the field when a wounded young operative seeks out his help,” reads the official synopsis.

All eight episodes of Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Deathwatch are available to stream now and gaming fans are loving the latest instalment in the long-running series.

Right from its opening sequence, SPLINTER CELL: DEATHWATCH has action worthy of John Wick. Now playing. pic.twitter.com/bb70F7wb6b

— Netflix Geeked (@NetflixGeeked) October 14, 2025

“Splinter Cell: Deathwatch is fantastic. As a casual fan of the games, I was really curious if they could pull off a solid adaptation – and my goodness, did they ever. This is EXACTLY what the franchise needed to reignite the brand. The action’s brutal, the imagery’s beautifully done, and the story’s actually SUPER compelling. Sam Fisher is BACK baby,” wrote one fan.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this but...Splinter Cell: Deathwatch is actually quite good. Of course I have critiques and things that bugged me, but it’s easily the best Splinter Cell content we’ve had in the last decade (Yes I know that’s a low bar BUT STILL) Worth a viewing,” added another. “Hopefully they do another season and maybe this leads to a remaster of the classic trilogy,” said a third.

I binged the whole serie yesterday night, amazing show https://t.co/HYIHbKoKNe

— Jean Wick (@JeanWick12) October 15, 2025

“I wanted to do it almost like the timeline kept going since the last game,” said Kolstad in an interview with The Verge, with Deathwatch starting with a retired Sam Fisher living on a farm. “Adaptations are tough. To move from one medium to the next, you have to build out new things, and you’re losing stuff. I made sure that we retained his history as best we could.”

“Maybe it’s because there hasn’t been a Splinter Cell game in quite some time, [Ubisoft] just kind of let me go with it,” he added. “Once I explained that I was doing Old Man Logan by way of Point Blank, they understood what I was trying to do.”

At the end of last year, it was confirmed that Tom Hardy’s Splinter Cell movie definitely wasn’t happening, more than 12 years after it was first announced. “That movie would have been awesome,” said producer Basil Iwanyk. “We just couldn’t get it right, script-wise, budget-wise. But it was going to be great. We had a million different versions of it but it was going to be hardcore and awesome. That’s one of the ones that got away, which is really sad.”

In other news, rapper Skrilla has revealed that his breakout viral hit ‘Doot Doot (6 7)’ will feature on the soundtrack to Grand Theft Auto 6.