Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Gold Pack

Pros • Modeled after real-world events and equipment • R6's masterful blend of strategy and action • Rainbow Six, Eagle Watch, and the strategy guide in one box. • Wide variety of missions locations	Cons • Lack of in-mission save might put some people off • Nothing new if you're already bought things separately. • Those damn stealth missions
Bottom Line A great package to get...if you're new to the R6 experience. Rainbow Six was the game that proved beyond any question that 3D engines could do more than provide mazes for people to run around and shoot each other in. It proved that strategy and action can work together. There are similar games, some bad, some good, but even when I play the good ones I can’t help but feel that they’re standing in R6’s shadow. And here is the Gold Edition, with all the R6 goodies in one box.

There are two kinds of people reading this review: those that require a smack on the head, and those that don’t. Permit me to explain. Those who do not deserve a smack have played R6 before and are wondering if this bundle offers anything new. Your answer is that it contains the original game, the Eagle Watch expansion pack, and a special Prima strategy guide which covers both the game and expansion. That’s about all. So whether it’s worth getting depends on whether you’re missing a piece or whether or not you think you need some help. Your call.

And those who need the smack haven’t tried this series before. Well, here’s your chance to get it all in one package.

A quick recap for the benefit of those who haven’t been here before: you are in charge of Team Rainbow, a top-secret counter-terrorist team consisting of the top soldiers from all over the world. Rainbow is called in for politically sticky, high-risk jobs. The go to places around the world that have been seized by terrorists include museums, oil rigs, etc. The terrorists take hostages or threaten to do something disastrous, such as detonate a bomb. Rainbow swoops in, airs out the terrorists, and rescues the innocents.

The game is divided into two phases. First, there is a planning phase. You select members of your team, give them weapons and armor, and assign them into squads of up to four. You are also given a map of the area you’re going into, with every room, every door, every staircase, every window laid out for you. What you don’t know is where the terrorists are. So you’ve got to plan routes for your squad to take through these environments so that they sweep as safely as possible through them, but are also able to deal with any threats they encounter. There’s your strategy fix, and it’s a good one. A well-planned attack is critical to the game.

During the action phase, you take control 3D-shooter style, and clean up the levels. You can jump back and forth between squads. The computer will take control of the squad when you’re not controlling it, traveling by itself, killing foes, even escorting hostages to safety. For tricky parts, you can call “Go Codes” to tell your teams to move and act at specific times, so you can coordinate attacks, say have three teams converge on a room at once to make sure the gun-toting maniacs inside get ventilated.

When you encounter hostages, be careful. The terrorists will make good on their threats to kill them. Make too much noise and they might detonate whatever it is they’re sitting on, or kill a civilian, in which case it’s mission over. You not only have to worry about your own safety, but the hostages too. And don’t get too trigger-happy either. Your bullets can’t tell the difference between a civilian and a terrorist.

Oh, one more little detail. There are no health packs in this game, no 100 hit points. The game is far more realistic when it comes to bullet damage. If you take a bullet, it’s almost guaranteed you die. Take two, and it’s 99.9 percent certain. As for three, I can’t remember if I ever got hit three times and lived. If I did, I was in rough shape.

See how important that planning stage is?

This fact also makes the levels more terrifying. Knowing you can get killed in a second makes things much more intense. You’ll need to change your shorts when you hear a door open behind you, or hear a gunshot and can’t see the source. I should mention at this point, the game has no in-mission save. This is usually something we reviewers hate, but I can see why it was done here. If you can hit Quickload, you don’t need to be cautious when entering a room, which robs the game of its flavor. Missions can be fairly quick anyway, and in fact, some are best completed by a high-speed assault.

The missions are set all over the world, in a wide variety of locations. Office buildings, laboratories, even a fun park. It’s fun to get into shootouts in these locations, since they look like they could exist in the real world. It’s slightly surreal to see a bullet-marked wall and a dead gunman next to an amusement park ride. The game is made with a nod to Tom Clancy’s meticulous detail, particularly in the mission backstories. As with Tom Clancy novels, events may be fictionalized, but they are grounded in today’s events, so some of these situations sound awfully plausible.

There are also outdoor environments, although these don’t look quite as good, since they’re obviously boxed in. Still, they’re decent. More objectionable are the stealth missions, which don’t allow you to use deadly force while you place a bug. These missions are extremely difficult, and isn’t this a job for spies anyway? This team is designed for kicking ass, not cat burglary.

The only thing R6 Gold is missing is the ability to lean around corners, something that thankfully was added to the sequel, Rogue Spear.

Honestly, if you’ve never tried Rainbow Six before, give yourself a treat and pick this up, especially now that it’s bundled all in one. You’re catching a break because the Eagle Watch expansion pack was pretty light as expansion packs go (just three new weapons, five new missions, though it did add six new multiplayer modes), but hey, if you’re getting R6 for the first time, why not get the whole thing and the strategy guide to boot?

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