Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six

Pros • Brilliant mix of strategy and action • gets the player into the role of anti terrorism operative • incredibly tense game play • Tom Clancy back story • good missions • fantastic planning mode	Cons • lite documentation • multiplayer difficulties • rotten ai
Bottom Line The intensity of the experience and the thrill of planning and executing a smooth tactical assault are well worth the price of admission. Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six is an example of brilliant game design. First of all, the crew at Red Storm Entertainment have chosen a subject with mystique. Elite forces such as GSG 9, GIGN, and especially the S.A.S., after their dramatic 1980 storming of the Iranian Embassy in the U.K., have almost become real life Batmen in the media coverage that they receive. Shadowy, gadget loaded heroes who, in a split second, can bust in and save the innocent by kicking evil's ass. One of the major difficulties that these elite forces have is that they are overwhelmed with volunteers. Everyone wants to be one of those shadowy, death-dealing defenders of the free world. Well, forget the grueling, twenty hour, forty mile marches in full kit, the barrage of physical and psychological battering designed to break down and drive out the wasters, the years of training and most importantly, the commanding officers yelling in your face that it would take to try and join the special forces group of your home nation. You can just snag Rainbow Six instead.

Tom Clancy

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six casts a player in the role of commanding officer of an elite, multi-national Counter Revolutionary Warfare group named Rainbow Six. Tom Clancy's touch is seen in the detailed story line and background information about each of the people and groups involved in the plot of the game. All of this rich and detailed background and plot is overwhelmed by the game and most gamers will find themselves simply ignoring the plot in their hurry to get on with the next mission.

The campaign of Rainbow Six follows a string of 16 missions. There are a couple of battles in open spaces and a couple of stealth missions that involve only one soldier, but most of the missions are intense, Close Quarter Battle, hostage rescues. The true genius of Rainbow Six's game design is that the player is the one who must plan each action. After the mission briefing, the player must select the soldiers who will participate, assign them gear and then draw up a Tactical Assault Plan.

Planning

In the planning phase, the player assigns the soldiers to fire teams and gives detailed, step by step orders that those fire teams will follow. This is accomplished by an excellent interface that allows the player to place a series of waypoints on the map. As well as the waypoints, the team is also assigned Rules Of Engagement and can be given orders to carry out specific actions such as breaching a door with explosives, fragging a room with a grenade, using a flashbang or diffusing a bomb. Go Codes can be issued to precisely coordinate the timing of the plan. All of the careful planning gives the player a huge investment in the success of the mission and is perhaps the best part of the game.

Execution

Once the player is satisfied with the assault plan, and pushes the Execute button, Rainbow Six shifts into the first person shooter that is the core engine of the game. The player can play as the team leader of any of the fire teams and is able to switch on the fly from team to team. The action phase of Rainbow Six is incredibly intense and has some serous flaws. The intensity wins. Rainbow Six is a real world simulation. Unlike most FPS games where the characters can absorb numerous bullets and discover power ups, in Rainbow Six, if someone gets shot, they die. Since most of the action is close quarter battle, enemy encounters are quick and deadly. To be successful, grenades and flashbangs must be properly employed. Stealth and sniping are also important to the game. Every corner and every doorway is potentially lethal. Each mission plays out as an enormously intense experience. The game even models stress and if the soldiers are wearing heart rate monitors, the player can see who is close to breaking.

Murphy! (The code used when something has gone wrong)

Close quarter battle and hostage rescue require precise teamwork and well trained reactions. The AI of Rainbow Six is not up to the task. Watching your fire teams frag themselves with grenades, walk and fall like shooting gallery targets past a terrorist on their way to the next waypoint and pin themselves in doorways or corners is enormously irritating. The player will sometimes have to play snow plow and physically push the other soldiers through doorways or around corners. The best way to clear rooms often is not to use the grenades or flash bangs, but to slowly inch around the corner until a leg or a shoulder of a terrorist is seen and to gun them down. This enormously slows the assault down and ought to give the terrorists time to react and either defend themselves or, at least, shoot the hostages. They do not. I have even found myself pinned on a ladder below a terrorist who had shot the soldier ahead of me on the ladder but is now standing their stunned while I push him out of the way, clear my weapon and cap him. The AI is certainly not up to the standards of Half-Life, where enemies actually react to and run from grenades. In a game that is simulating elite forces, the shortfall is painfully obvious. The game also lacks a replay option that would allow the gamer to watch an action after the fact and to see where exactly things went wrong or right.

Character Modeling

Rainbow Six has the best, most fluid and most realistic character animations that I have come across. The 3D environments also surprised me with their excellence. Music and sound effects are top notch.

Multi Player

The same intensity and SNAFUs that exist in the single player game are even more apparent in multi play. Multi player scenarios are short, intense and deadly. It is possible to play the single player maps cooperatively but no one does. Almost every game online is a Team Survival. The last team with a soldier standing wins. Invariably, everyone just runs around independently. The inability to communicate with teammates results in this mayhem. There is lots of death by friendly fire. (You still have to go to Fireteam for true team play). Had the multiplayer games included the planning phase, where a team leader could lay waypoints and issue orders that the team members could follow, the game might be totally different and better.

Worse, Rainbow Six is not the multi player engine that is Quake 2. There are real problems with lag and how the game handles it. Even on fast servers, lag is a problem. Rather than freezing in position until the data is available like occurs with most multi player games, Rainbow Six keeps playing as normal on your machine at home and then when the data arrives, adjusts. This results in huge jumps backwards in time and space. Sometimes even to a death that the player never saw. Very often, I found myself shooting at ghosts. I could have a perfect shot at someone and be ready to shoot them down dead, but because I am not actually where I think I am, they do not die and I suddenly find myself transported back in time.

Rainbow Six is not a great multi player game, but the intensity of the single shot kills, again, nearly saves it. But not quite.

Give Me A Manual

Rainbow Six has documentation sufficient to play the game, but is far short of what it could have been. Why not use the writing abilities and knowledge of Tom Clancy to create a beautiful manual that would teach gamers about what they were doing. I would love to have seen a manual that discussed the different weapons and tactics of counter terrorism forces. Something that teaches what exactly a flashbang is and how it ought to be employed, what type of armour these groups wear, some of the actions that have been waged in the past, and so on. The manual is barely sufficient and very much less than it could have been.

Conclusion

Rainbow Six has some flaws, but the project was ambitious and the game design brilliant enough to carry the game through with flying colours. I learned to play within and around the limitations of the AI. I learned to plan for these problems and how to jump from team to team enough to avert most serious screw ups. The intensity of the experience and the thrill of planning and executing a smooth tactical assault are well worth the price of admission.

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