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Tango is a dance!

The standard assortment of missions – save the hostages, defuse the bomb, plant the bug without being seen – are back. Now that wouldn’t be all that exciting if we didn’t get to visit exotic locals like the Cayman Islands, Switzerland and a grotesque oil refinery in Venezuela. The number of missions may be few but at least there is a good variety of choices on the menu. The maps are large, detailed and laid out in vicious Rainbow Six fashion. Terrorists will greet your team with sniper fire from windows, a withering hail of bullets from high vantage points and deadly barrages fired at anyone caught in the open – if you let them.

One dead dude

Heartbeat sensor

My heart makes no more noise

Properly played, Rainbow Six is a game that will reward stealth, speed, coordination and a quick trigger finger. There’s a tangible thrill when rushing through a map the first time, scanning for movement, getting in position, assaulting a room and waiting for the next go-code. A certain amount of randomness in enemy positions makes each run through a map different than the one before, and though after a few tries you learn the positions, you can also learn to anticipate dangerous situations without having been there before.

To help the team succeed is an assortment of the finest combat gear the world has to offer. From ghetto weapons like Mac 11s and Micro Uzis, through terrorist gear like AK-47s to the most modern assault rifles like Steyr AUGs, it’s all there. Rainbow Six favorites like heartbeat sensors, flashbangs and the assortment of light, medium and heavy armors. Too bad none of it matters.

Alpha, man down!

As far as Raven Shield is concerned, it’s almost like any assault rifle is good enough. Any submachine gun will do the job. The various ratings, like damage, range and so on – don’t seem to have much of an effect. For all intents and purposes, the kill power of a weak gun like the MP5-SD is the same as the Barrett .50cal sniper rifle. That’s not to say I wouldn’t prefer an M16 over an Uzi, but the differences between M16s, M4s, AUGs and AK-47s are really minimal.

You did good ding

Go team go

Gruesome

The same problem applies to the armor. When every enemy seems to take a bead on your head, the amount of body armor you’re wearing is meaningless. Since most hits end up as deaths, a few as incapacitated (dead for all intents and purposes) and even fewer as wounds (they’ll recover after a mission), you might as well always be in light armor for the extra stealth and speed.

As always, the assault class is the one which gets the real workout. Occasions for the use of snipers, demolitions experts and recon experts are limited. In fact, the only use of recons we found was in the forced-stealth missions.