Rainbow Six Siege Review

Finally. Tactical shooting HAS COME BACK, to Rainbow Six. But will it be as beloved, as Dwayne Johnson is when he returns to the squared circle? That is going to be a pretty varied mix of affirmatives, and negatives depending on the people you ask.

PROS: A return to the days of Rainbow Six 3.

CONS: But with less of the planning, and management.

UNATTRACTIVE: Shortcut transactions.

When Rainbow Six Siege was first announced, I was actually pretty ecstatic. I had loved the original three games, and their expansions. In their time, most shooters were either single player exploration games that required shooting anything that moved, or arena shooters. Don’t get me wrong, I loved those games too. Doom, Quake, Unreal Tournament, Duke Nukem 3D, and Rise Of The Triad were some of my most played shooters of all time. Of course that excitement was tempered with some skepticism considering some of the publisher’s mistakes with high profile releases in recent years.

But Red Storm Entertainment saw an opportunity to make a shooter that required thinking in a new way. Coupled with Tom Clancy’s writing, they produced some deep games that focused on tactics. Instead of laying waste to hordes of monsters, and aliens you were placed in hostage situations, or in missions to thwart terror plots.

As I covered in my Rainbow Six 3 review, you had to plan who was going to enter what area of a given map with your friends. Everyone had a role. There were different gadgets usable by different classes. You couldn’t just run, and gun. You had to have a steady aim for the sake of accuracy. Those games were built on a nice mix of entertaining action, and tactical realism.

But after Rainbow Six 3, the acquisition of Red Storm by Ubisoft would be complete. The following games would depart the tactical shooting almost entirely. Lockdown was not only a barely recognizable game in the series, but it was also pretty abysmal. R6 Vegas, and Vegas 2 proved to be solid linear cover shooters. But to original fans, didn’t really feel like Rainbow Six games.

So now we have Rainbow Six Siege, which promised to take the series back to its tactical roots. I’m pleased to say it actually does fulfill that promise. It isn’t as deep as the old games, but it still completely abandons the linear corridor cover shooting of the last few games. Rainbow Six Siege is indeed, a tactical shooter once again.

Now having said that, things are still different. Don’t come into this game thinking you’re going to be getting Rainbow Six 3 with prettier graphics. There are a number of changes to the formula including some of the applicable tools from the Vegas games. There are some entirely new things too like destructible environments,  a ranking system, and a class system. There are also a couple of things that will make some players groan, like the inclusion of microtransactions, and a season pass, that really isn’t much of a season pass.

Rainbow Six Siege also doesn’t give you much of a single player component. In the original games you could play through the various maps with NPCs in lieu of other players. You could choose which characters would enter each map, and then play through each of them, with their preset objectives. There was a loose narrative that tied the missions together to make for a storyline too.

Instead, this game gives you a mix of challenges that act as training for the multiplayer. It isn’t bad. It does offer similar objectives as the old game, taking down terrorists, or freeing a hostage, or defusing a bomb. The difference is that now you have to do all of these on your own. There aren’t any NPC troops for you to give commands to. You don’t have a planning map. Instead, you’ll get a brief FMV setting up what you’re supposed to do. It doesn’t mean that these solo missions aren’t fun.

The missions actually can be fun, and challenging. The narrated intros by Angela Bassett are pretty awesome. They have great delivery, and feel like you’re watching an episode of a network action drama at 8pm.  They set up each of the missions fairly well. You can also skip them, if you want to get right into the action. But they give you enough information about what to do, where you should probably see them at least once.

The main issue, outside of not being able to do pre mission planning is that there aren’t a lot of them. If you’re committed, you’ll burn through them in a couple of hours tops. The game does give you some challenges within the missions to shoot for, which will give them some replay value. But they’re ultimately not very long. Beating the missions, and meeting the challenges will give you in game currency for multiplayer unlocks. So in that regard you may want to do them anyway if you’re just starting out.

The unlockable content in the game is almost required. When you first start playing the multiplayer modes you won’t have access to the characters the way you do in the first few games in the series. In the old games, you, and friends pick characters for your missions. Then you choose their gear, whether or not you want other characters to come in as NPC alliances, and their gear if you do.

This game doesn’t have NPC help. So you have to play the game to earn in game currency. You can then use the currency to unlock other characters. Then you can alter each character’s load out, and use more in game currency to unlock gear for their load out. Each character also has one unique weapon or gadget. Some of them are used to breach walls, or find booby traps. Some of them are used to set traps, or find enemy locations.

Each character is in a subset of the international groups for recruitment. There are four characters in each. Two for offensive teams, and two for defensive teams. These relate directly to the game mode you are playing. Out of the box you have either competitive player vs. player modes, or cooperative player vs. environment modes.

In the PvP modes there are teams of attackers, and teams of defenders. Depending on the game, sometimes you’ll find each round the teams swap positions. Before each round you get to choose out of your pool of unlocked characters. Hurry up in this segment because the game only allows one of each character. So if you, and another player both unlocked Smoke for example, only one of you can play as that character.

Once everyone has their character, and gear selected your team will vote on an entry point. This is one of the things that will annoy some original fans. You can’t split off entry spawns between everyone. The entire team will spawn on whichever location gets the most votes. So if you’re the attacking team, you’ll need to agree to send some players to different entries on foot when the round truly begins.

Most of the classic modes cycle through PvP. In some games you’ll have one side trying to rescue a hostage from the other. In others one side of attackers has to diffuse two bombs. In either scenario the attackers can also win if they kill everyone on the defending team. Of course if time runs out or the defenders kill all of the attackers, they win the round.

If you’re on the attacking team you really as a team, want to complete the objectives though. Because winning rounds gives you in game currency to go toward unlockable characters, and gear. But winning rounds by diffusing bombs, or rescuing hostages from the other side will get you even more money for those things.

This is also where a lot of the new gear comes into play. This game adds a lot of destructible environments into the mix. You can breach many (not all) of the walls in the homes, and buildings you infiltrate. When you do this the game gets a really fun dose of Red Faction thrown into the mix. It’s so enthralling to be able to rappel up the side of a building, crash through a window, and take down an unsuspecting opponent. It’s exciting to blow a hole through a floor, fall through, and grab a hostage, while your comrades storm the room, and cover your escape.

Rainbow Six Siege also makes the PvE modes that were introduced by the first three R6 games shine in most cases. Terrorist Hunt is back. You can play this mode by yourself, but you’ll really want to play it with friends. Just like the PvP, in this, and other PvE modes you’ll vote on a sole entry point. Beyond that this mode is pretty much the same popular Rainbow Six mode you know, and love. You’ll go into a map with your gear, try to find every NPC villain, and take them down.

Hostage rescue comes up two different ways. In one version you, and your team have to go into a map crawling with terrorists, and extract the hostage. You have to locate them, pick them up, and bring them back to one of the entry points on the map. Doing this can be a challenge because often times the game spawns bad guys near the extraction point on your way back. If you’re carrying the hostage you can only use your side arm. You can set the hostage down but then you put them at risk, and if they die your team loses.

The other version is a horde mode, where you have to stop 4 waves of enemies from killing the hostage. So you get to use all of the defensive gear from the PvP modes to thwart the enemy AI from getting in. If you can hold the position down through the four waves your team wins. If you all die trying, or the hostage dies, you lose.

The bomb mode has you sneaking into the map, finding the bombs, and disarming them. When you do start to disarm the bomb, the game temporarily becomes a horde mode, as you have to gun down waves of enemies until a timer gets down to zero.

There are a number of challenges you can meet in the multiplayer missions to get more in game currency to unlock things faster. But one of the things that will make many annoyed is that the game has microtransactions. Thankfully they aren’t going to give you game breaking weapons.  They mainly act as the ones that NetherRealm added to Mortal Kombat X. You can spend real world money, to get chunks of in game currency. Then you can use that currency to unlock the characters, and gear right away, rather than playing the game.

The thing is, you get a pretty respectable amount of money for simply playing. Even a bad player will likely have everything unlocked within the first few days of playing. It makes buying the currency a pretty silly purchase for anyone other than the handful of people who insist on having access to everything instantaneously.

On top of the buyable game currency, Ubisoft put out a $30 season pass for the game. It also may not seem worth it to most people. The pass touts that you’ll get a permanent boost, which means you’ll get more in game currency for playing missions. You’ll end up unlocking things faster. On top of that you’ll get to use the unlockable characters right away, and a bunch of skins for the weapons in the game. One of which is exclusive to the pass.

The PC version of the game is the most preferable way to play if you have a machine that can run it. Ubisoft released a free HD Texture pack for the game that makes things look a lot nicer, and there are a wealth of performance options. On the lowest settings the game looks pretty close to the console versions. On medium details you’ll be about on par. Of course on high or ultra settings you begin to look better.

Because the game is so scalable you can expect pretty good performance across the board. Turning settings down on a midrange rig can get you well above 60 frames per second in many cases. On a low end machine you may not see that kind of performance, but it can at least be as playable as the console versions, provided there’s a decent video card installed. Ultra settings actually do push computer hardware a bit. My midrange GTX 760, and my i7 4770k managed to run everything on Ultra, but frequently dropped below 20fps if any structures were destroyed.  Ultra settings are truly meant for people with upper ended video card.

If you’re playing on a console you won’t have performance or visual options. But all of the versions will have to contend with Ubisoft’s Uplay. I had some issues when I initially started playing. To change my avatar the service made me log into yet another service, the Ubisoft Club. To do that I had to go to a separate website, which crashed a few times before eventually let me finish that menial task. I also ran into problems getting my friends list to sync up. Trying to add them in game, using the overlay listed everyone as offline, even though they weren’t. Alt+Tabbing out to my desktop, and going into Uplay that way let me add them fine.

The service still has a way to go before it can hang with the likes of Steam or GoG. I will give the service credit in that at least during installation linking Uplay with Steam went easy enough. If you buy the game through Steam, this option allows the game to log you into the service rather than making you manually fire up the client. Though you’ll still have to be running both clients. Once I was able to iron out the annoyances of Uplay I did begin to have a good time.

Rainbow Six Siege is actually pretty good. A lot better than my inner cynic expected. You actually get an experience that is close to the original game’s. Not exactly the same, there are some improvements. Not a perfect iteration, there are some disappointing omissions like the lack of LAN play. Uplay integration still needs some work. The season pass doesn’t provide much value for the majority of customers.

But even with those disappointments I still find myself recommending the game. The game is a lot of fun to play, and if you’re a lapsed fan who has skipped the last few campaign driven games you’ll find a lot to like. Conversely, fans of Vegas might hesitate before buying Siege because of the limited things for a lone player to do. Rainbow Six Siege is a fun if flawed return to form for the series.  Anyone who spent hours playing Raven Shield, and longs for a game in the same vein can feel confident picking it up.

Final Score: 8 out of 10

Insurgency Review

It seems as if modern military themed shooters are a dime a dozen. Call Of Duty 4 turned the series into a nearly guaranteed seller every year. So big a seller, that over the last decade many games have taken that theme. Even games that never competed directly with its mechanics, or action movie narratives. EA’s Battlefield certainly altered itself over the years to compete with it. Other games crashed, and burned in their attempts to clone Activision’s 800 pound gorilla. So here comes an indie game looking to nip at the heels of those big budget war shooters.

PROS: Challenge. Gear mechanics. Stellar map design. Old school tactical mechanics.

CONS: High difficulty. Graphics won’t satisfy those with unreasonable expectations.

MOD SQUAD: This joins the list of video games that started life as mods for popular titles.

The developers started Insurgency as a mod for Half-Life 2. Over time, and setbacks this eventually led to the creation of an entirely new game in Source engine. If it sounds like a familiar story, that’s because it is. Many other games in recent memory have followed a similar path. The original Counter-Strike is probably the biggest example, launching not only an entirely new franchise, but the careers of developer Gearbox Software.

Only time will tell if New World Interactive will follow the same trajectory. But Insurgency has the potential to  become a pretty big franchise if this title is any indication. Let’s get one thing out of the way, the entire focus here is multiplayer. There is no story driven campaign of scripted events to really speak of. There is a tutorial that has a little bit of exposition, and context. But it doesn’t go into any deep territory. There’s nothing that will remind you of more serious war movies like Platoon. It just explains that you’ve joined up with some contracted mercenaries who have been hired to fight off terrorists. The game doesn’t reference any groups or nations in order to avoid too much controversy. But just like Call Of Duty, Battlefield, and Counter-Strike you’ll be fighting in environments inspired by real world locations.

While there’s no doubt Insurgency borrows from other games, it seems to take out loans on only the good modes. There are several different modes to choose from in both , competitive, and cooperative styles of game play:

Push is fairly similar to the Rush mode you’ve likely played in any of the last few Battlefield games. There are three objectives on the map for the attacking team to claim, while the defenders have to stop them. If the attacking team succeeds, the defenders are pushed back, until they either successfully hold a position. Or, until they’re pushed back to their final position, and destroyed. There are no nodes to destroy in this mode, but the game mode works largely the same as in BF’s Rush.

Ambush is much like the Escort mode you’ve seen in Team Fortress. There are extraction zones on the map, and one team has to escort an assigned player to one of them. The assigned player has a limited load out to defend themselves. The opposing side wins if they can manage to kill off that specific player before they can make it to an extraction zone.

Firefight, and Skirmish are similar to the Conquest modes you’ve played in Battlefield. The difference between the two is that Skirmish adds a weapon cache to the mix. If destroyed, it deals a blow to the opposing team’s ability to have reinforcement tickets. Firefight replenishes tickets for a team when they capture a node on the map.  In both modes though, capturing all three nodes is essential to keeping the enemy team from being able to replenish tickets.

Strike changes things up from the other modes. By making an attacking team go after weapon caches, while defenders try to stop them. If the defenders can’t stop them they lose. They’ll also lose if they are wiped out while trying to stop the attacking team. It’s a little bit higher on the stress factor than some of the other modes as a result.

Occupy is essentially a king of the hill mode, where both teams try to hold a single position on the map. When your team is holding the position, you don’t have to worry about losing waves of lives. But the second you’re on the losing end, trying to reclaim it you do. So the game goes until time runs out, or until one side is out of lives.

But the game doesn’t end with these modes because there are a few cooperative ways to play as well. The most noteworthy mode is Hunt mode which feels like it was heavily inspired by Rainbow Six 3. In that game teams would enter a map, and plan a way to use stealth to take out computer controlled terrorists. If all of the players failed to do so they lost the game. But if even only one person was left standing at the end, the mission was successful. This mode is very similar except the maps are much larger, being a war game. It can be especially tough when dealing with night versions of the various maps, and ridiculously accurate snipers. But if you can pull it off it feels very rewarding.

The other cooperative modes aren’t quite as fun, but they will still have their fans.  Checkpoint is a lot like Push except you’ll have all of the human players fighting against the computer. In addition to that mode is the Survival mode which is effectively a horde mode. Teams try to survive against waves of computer controlled enemies for as long as humanly possible.

Once you’ve decided what kind of game you want to play you can either use the Source browser list, or you can invite friends into a group, and have the game find, and connect you to a server by itself. Having the game do it is a lot easier, and more convenient. However, it won’t always find you the closest possible server in proximity to everybody. So doing this does mean you’re going to end up on the occasional lag ridden game. Purists will want to use the Source browser to find a server to mitigate this possible problem.

When you do connect to a game you’ll be assigned to one side by default, and it is here you can choose to either switch teams or choose your class. This is where Insurgency really starts to veer away from the path taken by other team based shooters. In most games, you are given a choice of four classes, each with its own weapon tree. Over time you level up, and have access to more weapons, and upgrades for that specific class. Insurgency abandons that formula. Instead of only four classes, there can be several. Classes are dependent on the map in question, as well as the mode that is being played. They are also different in number. So there may only be three openings for say, snipers, one for an engineer, and two for other classes. Another interesting spin is that there are two sub groups in each army rather than squads of four people. Each of these subgroups can have one player lead them.

Once everyone has a class chosen, and the match is about to begin players can then choose their load outs. Each player is given a number of points to use. Each weapon, attachment for a weapon, explosive, armor, pouch, and so forth has a point value. You cannot exceed the number of points given. So you have to really think about what you want to sacrifice. Do you want to beef up your shotgun at the expense of body armor? Would you rather have extra grenades, and a side arm instead of a beefy machine gun? Perhaps you want to extend your life above all else, and you put more of your points toward armor, and pouches, instead of primary weaponry.  It’s a refreshing change from the weapon tree system so many games have used over the past decade. It hearkens back to the days of Rainbow Six where tactical games let you use whatever you wanted so long as you were going to be okay with the trade offs.

Once everyone is settled with their load outs the game will begin. Insurgency makes a lot of use of voice chat. It’s built into the game, and it’s highly recommended you take advantage of it. It’s a lot easier to be able to communicate with everyone than trying to type in the chat box. For those who don’t have a headset, you can still type, just remember you’ll need to find a good spot to hide. The game does allow you to mute individual players too though. So for those times you find you have an abusive or annoying player, you don’t have to listen to them. The game also makes very good use of Valve’s VAC anti-cheat system. It really cuts down on the number of cheaters. No game is cheater free, mind you but it does seem to be one of the better systems in place.

That said, you can expect to die an awful lot in this game. Because it does not hold your hand at all. Many of the things we’ve been trained to expect simply aren’t here. If by some miracle you survive being shot you will not regenerate health. Oh you may cease experiencing blur, but that’s only because they’re no longer shooting at you. One or two more hits from another combatant will probably finish you off. Most of the weapons in this game will put you down in three hits max. If you have the maximum amount of armor you may take a few more, but you’ll also move slower. There are no crosshairs. That’s right. No crosshairs. You’re going to have to really use your eyes, and learn to lead your targets here. You can use iron sights to make aiming slightly easier, but it is also slower. You also won’t always find time to use it when engaging three or four enemies at the same time.

Fortunately, some of the attachments for weapons like foregrips, and scopes can help you. But again, you will have to sacrifice something else in order to use them. The same can be said during night maps, where you’ll want to use night vision goggles in lieu of something else. Suppressive fire is almost as important in Insurgency as scoring frags. One of the cool features the game has to offer is the effect of debris. The game doesn’t have destructible environments, but it does have dust, and particle effects flying off of surfaces when bullets hit them. This can overwhelm people because they can’t quite figure out where they’re being shot upon from. So often times suppressive fire can lead to a retreating enemy, allowing a teammate to get them if you couldn’t. Which leads to another difficulty. Unless a server is equipped to do it, there are no notifications. If you kill someone, you won’t know without checking for a body. There are no kill cams. If you die, you won’t see a spy cam or a replay revealing who took you out. Again, a server may run a program that displays who got the jump on you, but it isn’t going to tell you where.

If all of this sounds frustrating, and difficult, that’s because it is. Very much so. But in a good way. When you think about it, it leads to much more careful plotting, and communication with your team. As opposed to other games where it’s easy to place a spot marker on someone, or consult a mini map to find an objective. In Insurgency you’ll have to pull up a large map, and risk being shot. It’s better to memorize the maps after several plays to remember where objectives are. There’s something really compelling about the ramped up difficulty. Especially if you’ve played a lot of the classic tactical games like Rainbow Six, Counter Strike, or Battlefield 1942. Doing well feels a lot more rewarding here than in many other modern shooters. Even if you do end up feeling frustrated, it’s still fun. You’ll still want to succeed, and you’ll probably want to keep playing until you do.

Insurgency doesn’t have all of the bells, and whistles of a major AAA title. Being a Source game, there are some rough edges here. Simple geometry in some areas. Decidedly, lower quality textures in others. If you’re the type who obsesses over what a game looks like rather than how it plays, you may be a little turned off. Nevertheless, Insurgency is not an ugly game. The game does a pretty respectable job at displaying lights, reflections, and shadows. The parking garage section in the Ministry stage comes pretty close to the look of the one in Battlefield 3: Close Quarters’ Operation 925 stage.  Player models aren’t highly detailed, but are on par with the ones seen in some of the older Call Of Duty games. There are also a decent number of options in the graphics menu. Making this something quite scalable.

As a matter of fact, the game has some of the lowest system requirements compared to many other games that have come out over the past 12 months. The minimum requirements list a Core 2 Duo E6600, (A processor that came out in 2006), a Direct X 9.0c compliant Video Card with 512mb of memory on it ( This version of DX came out around 2004), and 6GB of space on the hard disk. Suffice it to say, if you have a fairly old computer that can’t run most new releases, you may be able to run this. Albeit on the lowest settings.  Which still look surprisingly decent all things considered. Even in the world of independent B games, it’s rare for a new game to run okay on a nearly ten-year old computer. The game also runs on Macintosh, which should please those on Apple boxes.

But Insurgency does have some technical issues that keep it from dethroning the ARMA, Call Of Duty, Counter-Strike, and Battlefield franchises of the world. The worst problem the game has is lag. To be fair, all of those other great games certainly have issues as well. But this is a crucial area for competitive games. Being on par with the others isn’t going to help it climb the mountain. The lag issues aren’t nearly bad enough to make the game unplayable. But there seem to be nights when the hosting servers can’t seem to keep up with the traffic. It’s about as infrequent an occurrence as it is with many of the AAA shooters. But it will annoy you if it does happen during a play session.

The other problem it has comes up very rarely, but it will still infuriate people. Sometimes the game will simply close, and exit to the desktop on its own. You won’t see a box show up explaining that it has crashed. You will just see your desktop as if you had never launched the game. Again, almost every other game it competes against has bugs, glitches or crashes. It’s a shame though because it could be another chance for New World Interactive to have one over on its peers. One can only hope these connection issues, and random crashes are solved soon enough. One thing that is very encouraging, is the fact that NWI has been frequently supporting this game with updates. So hopefully they can iron out these problems.

Insurgency may not have the best in visuals, drivable vehicles, or an action packed campaign with Hollywood set pieces. But it has plenty of modes to keep you busy, a large variety of maps, weapons, and a very good communication software feature. It also has very low system requirements, widening the potential player base. The lack of hand holding is going to be very compelling for those who tire of red splashes, and kill cams. Players looking for a really good team based tactical shooter will really love Insurgency’s many competitive modes. Players who want a great cooperative mode will love the Hunt mode.  If you’re looking for a great shooter, with a ton of replay value you should definitely take a look at this game. So long as you don’t mind average graphics, and a high level of challenge. Insurgency kicks ass, and it will certainly kick yours.

Final Score: 8 out of 10

Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield Review

Ask many modern gamers if they’re familiar with Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six series, and a lot of them will bring up Vegas, and Vegas 2. While in their own right they were solid games, they were a far cry from where the series began. Rainbow Six started out as a tactical shooter, one of the earliest departures from the death matches, and flag capturing rounds of Doom, Quake, and Unreal Tournament. Based loosely on the late Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six novel, these games had more variety than their contemporary versions.

PROS: Solid mechanics. Fun multiplayer. Strategy, and action meld nicely.

CONS: PC Multiplayer is mainly LAN nowadays. Console Multiplayer is mainly split screen.

AWESOME: The gold edition includes the Athena Sword expansion pack.

Tom Clancy’s books had been adapted into many hit movies. The Hunt For Red October, Patriot Games, and Clear and Present Danger were turned into theatrical thrillers. Video game adaptations were also inevitable. Red Storm Entertainment was partially conceived by Tom Clancy, and one of his earliest books, Red Storm Rising was adapted into a game for 8-bit computers like the Commodore 64, and Atari ST by Micro Prose. Years later Red Storm Entertainment would become a competent studio, making games based off of Tom Clancy’s novels as well as original games. When First Person Shooters were hitting their stride, Red Storm gave the world Rainbow Six.

The earliest Rainbow Six games took a different approach to the FPS. Instead of throwing you into a giant labyrinth to explore, or an arena to battle in, they went tactical. Maps were shown from an overhead view before each mission, and you could select a number of characters to put into teams. From there you could mark entry points to the level for each team, and would be tasked with sneaking in, subduing enemies, and rescuing hostages. The games also had a very strict damage system. Getting shot by a terrorist or other nefarious enemy would impede your movement. A second shot would be fatal. You could then control one of your NPCs. If all of your crew perished, or if a key target died you would fail a mission.

Rainbow Six 3 is the apex of these titles. Rainbow Six 3 takes all of the game play foundation of the originals, and builds upon it. When you fire up Rainbow Six 3 you will be greeted with a number of tabs. You can play through the single player campaign, play a single solo mission, or hop on for some multiplayer. The campaign opens up with a brief prologue describing the end of World War II, and how two high-ranking officials of the NDH puppet state of Nazi Germany, and Italy made off with untold amounts of loot. Sixty years pass, and suddenly there are attacks happening around the world. The  counter terrorist team, Rainbow is contacted to investigate, and thwart these attacks. The team follows a trail of attacks on banks, energy sources, and other interests that ultimately lead to South America. It is revealed that one of the two World War II war criminals is using the stolen money to try to resurrect a Fascist empire.

Along the course of 15 stages, Rainbow goes through all kinds of environments. Snow capped mountain towns.  An oil refinery. A shipyard. A penthouse. Just to name a few. Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield’s game play will start each mission with a detailed briefing. Each of the stages will have different objectives. Sometimes you’ll have to rescue a key person, or save multiple hostages. Other times you’ll have to kill every bad guy in the map. Before the mission begins you have the option to plan your course of action.

Players can first go to a screen where they can select which members of Rainbow to put on each of the teams.  Similar to the first game. From there each soldier’s load out can be configured in the gear room. Each soldier can have access to a primary weapon, a secondary weapon, and a few gadgets. There are many weapons, and gadgets to choose from. Rifles. Shotguns. Machineguns. Explosives. Heartbeat sensors. Infrared goggles. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. You’ll want to be careful when choosing load outs too. Because each mission can be easier or harder depending on the gear you choose to bring along.

Once you have your members, and equipment sorted out, it’s time to make a plan of action. The overhead view of the map is then displayed in vectors with icons for certain pathways. One can even see plans for each of the floors, and elevations. After surveying the entire map, players then choose entrances for each team to enter. From there it’s time to deploy your team, and make the best of your decisions. You can also let the game decide everything for you, if you just want to jump in, and play. But this won’t necessarily give you the best setup for the mission at hand.

Each group enters the stage, and proceeds to attempt to complete their objectives. You will find icons come up on interactive objects. When this happens you can press or hold the space bar (or another key if you change your binds) to do just that. There are all kinds of interactive moments. Mundane things like climbing ladders, to the more advanced stuff, like giving your NPC’s commands. In the case of opening or closing doors, This will kick them wide open. If you need to be more discreet, (9 times out of 10 you’ll want to) You can use the wheel on your mouse to slowly open it or close it. You can also use the Q, and E keys to peek around corners. This is a must. Because terrorists love to flank the doorways in this game. You’re definitely going to want to ensure your safety when entering areas.

You’ll also want to use some of the specialized gear for the same reasons. Heartbeat sensors give you a rough estimation of where hostile threats may be ducking out in a room you are about to enter. Night vision is useful in darker rooms or other areas. Putting silencers on your guns also makes it a little bit harder for enemies to know where you’re shooting from. Of course, there are the big loud weapons too, as I’ve already mentioned.

If things do go awry, and you end up getting killed, you can take control of one of your NPCs to try to complete the mission. In this regard they can also act as extra lives. But don’t get too comfortable with that idea either. Losing everyone in the mission isn’t the only way you can lose. If an objective isn’t completed, you fail. If time runs out, you fail. If the mission involves rescuing hostages, and even one of them dies, you fail. Rainbow Six 3 can be very difficult. Especially on the higher settings where the AI improves a lot. Also keep in mind the game puts in a fairly respectable attempt at realism in terms of ballistics. Your cross hair will widen farther, and farther in size if you aren’t in an accurate shooting position. So you can’t run, and gun the enemies, and expect to hit them. Many times your shots will miss if the cross hair isn’t positioned as tiny, and knit together as possible. You’ll also be killed in two bullets MAX. So stealth, and accuracy are key.

After every stage you have the option to either accept the outcome or re-do the stage. This is because if any of your characters die during the mission, they’re gone forever. Replaying the stage gives you the chance to succeed without losing anyone. Though you still very well may. Accepting the outcome moves you onto the next stage.

AI is about the only area that isn’t quite up to the bar set by the rest of the game. It is very good most of the time. Usually bad guys will use cover properly. If you’re using a shotgun to kill a terrorist, others will hear it, and give them back up. They’ll react to footsteps. They’ll run away if they feel out classed. Sometimes they’ll actually surrender, and you can arrest them. Unfortunately, the AI is also pretty inconsistent. Sometimes you can shoot one terrorist, and his comrade who is standing six inches away won’t react at all. Other times, a terrorist will go from not being able to hit anything one round, to becoming a crack shot the next. It makes for some unintentionally funny moments in a game that truly tries to be serious.

Once you’ve completed all of the missions there is still a lot of fun to be had. The game allows you to play individual stages with custom settings. Lone Wolf tasks you with trying to beat the stage using only one character with no NPC backup. Die, or fail to complete an objective, and it’s game over. Terrorist Hunt of course, peppers in however many terrorists you select, and it’s up to you to clear the level of them. Hostage mode tasks you with rescuing the hostages. You can also do individual story missions here.

Multiplayer in Rainbow Six 3 is a lot of fun provided these days you can get some workarounds going. Regrettably, Rainbow Six 3 is one of the games that used Ubisoft’s old account system which was replaced with Uplay. As such there aren’t anymore official servers for it. Thankfully, the game was coded with LAN support. So there are a number of ways you can still play this gem with friends. The first is the ever common P2P (Peer to Peer) way. Most homes these days have a P2P network set up, and don’t even realize it. If you have more than one computer in the house, networked through a router you can play multiplayer. Each person with a copy puts it on their respective computer, one person hosts, and everyone else can connect locally.  This is why the game was a popular choice for LAN parties (gaming parties where everybody brought their computer to a mutual friend’s home or other venue).

But if you don’t have the luxury of the time to organize a LAN party, there is a second way. You can use tunneling software to simulate a LAN over the internet. I’m not going to include a walk-through in this review, as explaining it is rather laborious. but I will say with a little tinkering it can be done. Everyone will need the same software, but once you have it the software simulates a local network by giving everyone a simulated IP. It’s generally secure, but there is one thing to be aware of. There is a security risk in that other players can possibly see your machine’s contents. So if you do go this route be sure it is only with friends you can trust.

Once you have everyone set up, you can play either Cooperative modes or Adversarial modes. Cooperative modes are essentially the same as the custom single player modes. Except that there will be a number of you playing together. Adversarial modes are mostly very different. There are death match modes for single, or teams. These act more like a Last Man Standing game type as they go on until one man or team is left. More interestingly, is a bomb mode, where one team of bad guys tries to set bombs, while the other tries to disarm them. It’s similar to the mode found in Counter-Strike. There is also a variation on Team Fortress’ Hunted Style. In it there is a downed pilot one team needs to lead to an extraction point on the map. The other team needs to kill the pilot before he can get there. Finally, there’s a variant of the cooperative Hostage mode, where one team controls the terrorists, and has to stop the other team from rescuing them.

Overall the game is still a blast some eleven years later. Don’t let the antiquated graphics fool you.  The game’s fuzzy skyboxes, and lower geometry may not look that impressive today. But there is a lot of fun, and challenge to be had here. The audio also excels. The score is right out of the sort of Hollywood thrillers other Tom Clancy novels were converted into. Sound effects are well crafted. The game was also one of the earliest to support 3D audio cards like the SoundBlaster Audigy. Being an older title it’s also an inexpensive title, that nearly anyone today should be able to run.  Considering the minimum requirements were an 800mhz Pentium III, 128MB of RAM, and 32MB of Video RAM on DX8.1 I think it’s safe to say, that old laptop you have in the cellar can handle it.

Although I should mention the game was ported to consoles. The Xbox actually saw two versions of the game, Rainbow Six 3 Raven Shield, and Rainbow Six 3 Black Arrow. The latter of which added a couple of new modes to the game. The PlayStation 2, and Gamecube received a port simply titled Rainbow Six 3. The key differences between these ports, are that the Xbox supported more players online, and had a few minor enhancements added to the visuals. It also received Downloadable Content like new multiplayer maps. The PlayStation 2 supported fewer players online, while the Gamecube had the online modes completely cut. Oddly enough however, the PlayStation 2, and Gamecube did feature two player split-screen. So if you were to want to revisit a console port today, those would be the ones to nab.  The other reason would be the console versions replace some of the PC versions multiplayer maps. So if you’re curious you can certainly track them down. They are ridiculously cheap should you decide to go that route instead.

No matter which version you pick up though, Rainbow Six 3 is a far cry from the norm. It combines some strategy elements into team shooting. Something all of its subsequent sequels thus far have seemingly abandoned. If you weren’t around for it when it came out, or missed it for some reason, check it out.

Final Score: 9 out of 10