Hands-On

We fear change

Don't worry, all you Rainbow Six lovers - that interface you've come to know and love hasn't changed. In fact, the mission setup screens and the in-game commands are virtually identical to those of the game's predecessor, with a few important additions. The most prominent difference is, of course, sniper mode. Pressing shift once will get you into sniper mode, and depending on which weapon you're using, pressing it again will either zoom you in closer, or take you back out.

The demo itself doesn't lend itself to sniping; your mission is simply to infiltrate a museum which has been taken over by terrorists and rescue all the hostages. If you'd like, you can plan out an attack strategy for the mission, although even the default strategy will generally allow a novice to triumph over the enemy. You aren't in this alone, after all - you've got the benefit of your comrades-in-arms. Red Storm games has polished up the AI on your cohorts, as well; they'll have less trouble getting stuck in tight spaces, among other things.

Bathroom break

Got 'im

Improved stuff

Rogue Spear boasts improved graphics over its predecessor, including pretty weather models that should make your team's nipples stand out on those crisp autumn mornings. Overall, though, it looks fairly similar to the original - solid, decent looking graphics, but nothing groundbreaking. After all, who has time to break graphical ground when they're busy designing a game that's fun, fun, fun?

Of course, not everything needs to be improved. Rogue Spear will have the same ol' fun multiplayer action - frag your friends via TCP/IP! If you don't have chums on a LAN, fear not, because the MSN gaming zone OR Mplayer.com will allow you to find some random people to meet and then kill. In fact, if you've got the demo, head over there right now! We did, and we, of course, whipped everyone's butt.

Those of you who get all hung up on technical details - you'll be able to play Rogue Spear with any D3D compatible video card, or even in software mode, if you've got at least four megs of video memory. At that point, though, you'll need a P266MMX, and you'll be turning off pretty much every option to make things look nice. That's the rub.

You die first

She's limbo-ing