The player controls the leader of a squad that normally consists of three teams of three. John Clark passes his post to Ding Chavez, who retires from active duty.
In the game Vegas , the player does not play for the first time Chavez, but the new team leader Logan Keller. Strategy and tactics are very important in the game. In the first three games, therefore, the planning phase plays a central role, with the two youngest parts of the series abandoning this in favor of a more action-prone playing principle.
The level of difficulty is therefore relatively high in the first games and has been reduced in the recent games to reach a larger clientele. Minimum System Requirements. Download Link. All of which should extend the Rainbow Six fan base well beyond the realism nuts. Another important step towards bringing the game closer to a wider first-person shooter audience is the complete overhauling of the planning stages. You just pick your team, get them kitted up and start exploring the lush environments and ridding them of evil tangos.
The hardcore audience - the kind who actually spend hours planning each phase of the mission on a blackboard and prefer to sit back watching their brilliant strategies play out rather than testing their reflexes - will find the interface much easier to use.
Laying down waypoints and setting specific orders for each stage can all be done with a few clicks. More impressive though, is the way the abstract 2D sketches have been replaced by detailed three-dimensional maps, making things much more enjoyable and intuitive - they even tempted me to drop a few waypoints from time to time.
It's still a stealthy kind of combat though. You have to move slowly, feeling the tension tighten with every step, your throat dry with the fear of a bullet coming from any of the dozen hiding places the enemy could be in. And, as with the rest of the titles in the series, bullets rarely wound, they leave you stone cold dead. What's more, the Al now seems to be far more aware of this potential.
Whenever we caught them with their pants down, they were just as likely to run screaming as they were to spray bullets at us. All NPCs have their own predispositions, making each game totally unpredictable. With the team Al also improved beyond recognition, Raven Shield looks set to create a new benchmark for tactical shooters. In october last year 50 Chechen rebels stormed a Russian theatre during a musical and held the audience and cast hostage, threatening to detonate the explosives strapped to their chests if their demands weren't met.
After all negotiations had broken down, Russian special forces released a powerful nerve gas into the auditorium, killing all the terrorists. They also managed to kill more than a hundred of the hostages, yet President Putin had the gall to pronounce the operation a success. He's obviously never played a Rainbow Six game. If it had been Raven Shield. But of course, if life were like a computer game, the Russian authorities would have had 87 attempts, each time going back to the drawing board, pondering their mistakes, tweaking their waypoints and dithering over whether Light Black Cammo was really the most appropriate dress code.
It was too hardcore for the masses, a fact not helped by the high difficulty level and horrendous graphics But it found a huge audience nonetheless - one hankering for a slower, more thoughtful shooter, where one shot kills and even the simple matter of opening a door practically Hires four meetings and a ort filed in triplicate.
And while the hard-as-nails, a-realistic method is still firrily in place, Raven Shield has had an Unreal engine facelift and no longer looks like it was beaten with an ugly - and exaggeratedly polygonal - stick. Gone is the deeply ugly, completely unfathomable planning stage Of old.
For most of us thou, the missions work something like this:move very slowly through the level, learning the usuar position of the terrorists and which rooms need particular care, while dying a lot.
Dying an awful lot. Get that little bit further while dying some more. Tear your eyes out in frustration and then die some more. As it only takes one bullet to die, it's a common occurance. So you try again, and then die some more. Not that this is a bad thing, necessarily, as it helps create an incredible amount of tension.
This is one of the few games that can make you feel genuinely nervous. Standing outside a door behind which is a sniper is like waiting at the doctor's for important test results. You pause. You wipe the sweat from your palms on your trousers. You build up the courage to start slicing the door open.
You see a surprised face. But the death of your own men isn't the most frustratina thina that can happen - it's the death of a hostage that will really get your goat. Between that and the drive to keep your best men from dying, you can expect to play most levels between times.
At least you do get a variety of locations to thwart terrorism in from picturesque Norwegian and Swiss mountain towns, to South American airports and mansions. The Unreal technology improves the series no end aesthetically, but apart from the detailed models, there is a bare, boxy look to most of the environments, and you are unlikely to be distracted from the work at hand by looking around and admiring the view.
But there are more important things to admire, like the feel of the weapons, which are great, and the little details such as footprints left in the snow which are useful for tracking down enemies. You can even watch as they are slowly covered by a fresh downfall.
The way you can open doors bit by bit using the mouse wheel slicing the pie is the technical term, greenhorns becomes second nature after a while and, although the number of commands you can give your team on the go is limited, the interface is very simple and intuitive. And delegating tasks via this interface is key to your success.
Getting someone else to open a door, throw a grenade in and clear the room out is often easier than doing it yourself. Especially in light of the razor-sharp enemy Al. Snipers in particular seem to know precisely when your head is about to pop round a corner. One quick peek and you get one right between the eyes. So, tense, infuriatirla enjoyable and bloody hard seem to sum Raven Shield up. Turn the difficulty level down to rookie, use the auto-aiming option or load a default plan and let the Al do all the work.
But then that would be cheating, and you won't get anywhere near the level of satisfaction you do when you beat a leVel by yourself. It would also be to get more feedback on where the enemies are, rather than just being told one has been spotted , Special mention go to Kevin Sweeney, the riten charged with giving you the psychological side of each mission briefing, since he sports a hilarious Yorkshire accent.
He sounds like an American trying to blend in at an Emmerdale convention. But other than that. Raven Shield is a serious business. After equipping your team with fully customisable weapons attach scopes to machine guns and heat sensors to sniper rifles and all manner of gadgets, it pays to spend some time planning your missions. Especially now this aspect of the game has been improved so much. You can even watch a preview of your whole route in a 3D box in the corner before you approve it.
If you're anything like me though, you'll skip this bit to just get on with the shooting or, if you're finding a level too hard to take without co-ordinated attacks, you can load up one of the default plans. And believe us, the Rainbow Six nuts in the US are not happy about it at all. You know the drill. You control an elite team of counter-terrorists who are sent on missions around the world. You plan your tactics in advance, you rescue the hostages and you die a lot.
You also spend a considerable amount of time wiping sweat off your brow as the tension escalates with each step. Every corner, every closed door hides a potential bullet in the head. Although the first Rainbow Six game detonated the whole tactical team shooter genre, a lot has happened since the sequel Rogue Spear appeared three years ago. Graphics too have moved on from those ugly, angular polygons, which might be why Raven Shield is using the latest Unreal technology.
But more on that later. Remember when leading a special group of agents against terrorists operating on a worldwide scale seemed like the stuff of fiction? Not anymore. While IRA attacks have always been on the British conscience, theT word has taken on a new dimension since September These are all things that can be dealt with.
The FBI has manuals oolhe stuff. In this kind of situation, there is no place for an international elite police team and the activation of Rainbow Six would not be justified.
What we have here then, is a set of realistic scenarios that can be dealt with tactically and heroically. Of course, since September 11," he adds, "we wanted to make sure that Raven Shield's threats and characters made no reference to those terrible events.
As with all Rainbow Six titles, the setting is slightly futuristic, to allow for credible political changes and, more interestingly from a gameplay point of view, to slot in some nifty gadgets. In this case, the "geopolitical" background involves the collapse of the Eastern bloc, putting the setting for most of the missions in Europe and South America.
The environments promise to be more varied than the ones in previous Rainbow games with missions taking place in hot locales and snowy fields, suburban houses and rocky mountains. It seems every developer is jumping on the Unreal train, and Ubi Soft is no different. But while it might be perfectly normal for adrenaline-filled shooters to use the hottest engine around, it has come as a surprise to many that it will be used for such a slow, thoughtful, realism-obsessed game.
Rainbow Six has always been high on tension and atmosphere, but fancy effects? Forget it. But there's a very good reason why they chose it. The engine is so advanced that it can easily be used to create real-world scenarios, spot on soldier animation and the kind of detail that is so crucial to this kind of game.
The weakest feature of Unreal- powered games has always been the Al, so it's encouraging to know that a lot of time is being spent on that area. Our objective is to make the enemies react according to the way you are playing, so the experience may be different each time you play.
That also means they will be unpredictable. The big questions though are how good will the Al of your team be, and whether the tortuous pre-mission planning will still be there. After all, while a small number of people actually enjoyed spending ages setting waypoints and pointing arrows all over the place, most gamers just wanted to get on with the action. After playing something like SWAT 3, where a beautifully simple command interface let you give orders during the missions without missing a step, it all seems like a waste of time.
Well, the good news is that, while the planning is still in there, it has been simplified to make it easier and faster to use. And you will also be able to give commands during the action with a new interface. The operatives are heavily trained and they always start by carefully studying the Intel information before entering the fray.
Everything during a mission moves quite fast, so timing and co-ordination are very important. It will be interesting to see how the new command system affects multiplayer games. Ghost Recon translated the Rainbow Six feel into wide-open spaces very well, but I still felt that the best bits in the game were the ones set in urban environments where you could scuttle inside buildings.
Not that Red Storm is too far away. As Mathieu says: "We are working very closely with them and meet up regularly. The team at Red Storm are highly involved on core topics of the game, like story, game design, characters, weapons and so on, and all important decisions are made with their input.
Still, it would be nice to see some of the improvements that Ghost Recon introduced adapted for Raven Shield, like the RPG elements and the unlocking of specialists.
No final decisions have been made, however.
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