Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six
- January 01, 2000 00:00 AM PST
Planning is for taxes, college, and retirement. Computer games tend to be of the moment, spontaneous, and impulse-driven. And rarely do the two meet-save in the compelling Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six.
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In this second release from Red Storm, you'll spend almost as much time prepping the members of the title's anti-terrorism unit in 2D as you do playing out the 17 missions in first- or third-person 3D.
That extra planning level gives Rainbow Six peculiar resonance-the events within seem the more vital due to the time spent preparing for them. I've experienced that just once before, in a 1994, European RPG called Clue!
In Rainbow Six, you draft your operatives from a pool of 20 specialists. Equip them with a realistic assortment of weapons, uniforms, ammo, and tools, and assign them to as many as four teams. Then use a 2D/3D blueprint to plot a path and set out orders to see each unit through a multilevel 3D environment-an embassy, a Congo mansion, an oil rig, and so on. Pick the team leader you'll control directly (you can flip between team leaders once the mission's underway).
And then let them go�and keep your fingers crossed.
The action allows you to feel involved with your teams-as in Urban Assault, personal intervention is a plus-and the strategy allows you to feel responsible for them. It's exhilarating to watch your men (and a couple women) climbing ladders, picking locks, and going mano-a-mano with threats to the Democratic way of life. I found myself wincing as I started to recognize the whump of Rainbow Six bodies hitting the ground.
On a system with a 3D accelerator card, the environments have a luminous realism that defied my expectations. On a P200 MMX without a 3D card, the game exhibited significant pop-up-especially in outdoor environments.
A lot more could have been done with the AI; as it is, enemies sit there waiting for you to stumble onto them. I'd like to have seen more team formations-they're always running in single file-and a replay mode so you can watch them in action and troubleshoot failed missions.
The mission maps contain far too much info on terrorist dispositions for my taste. I can see intelligence giving you a general sense of enemy positions and numbers, but knowing what's where takes the mystery out of the game. I also don't like having to quit out of a mission just to change a key assignment.
Finally, without the planning angle, the multiplayer game doesn't have the resonance of the single-player one-it's essentially a nice-looking shooter with five modes: deathmatch, team deathmatch, "stronghold" (defend or infiltrate a base), "double stronghold" (defend and infiltrate a base), and double bluff (capture the other team's hostage and protect yours). The online experience, via Microsoft's Zone, was richly schizophrenic. Larger contests lagged and sometimes never got underway at all-a problem apparently exacerbated by the innovative (but bandwidth-eating) use of live audio transmissions between players equipped with microphones. (Unhappily, files you need for this feature have to be added via a patch.)
So there's room for improvement in the planned add-on and sequel. But what's already present in Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six is impressive indeed. Work it into your plans.
