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Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six
Page 2
1st and 3rd person perspectives!
When you have done that flawlessly it's planning phase time. At this stage you will have to set up several waypoints on the 2D or 3D map of the upcoming mission. These waypoints indicates where a team has to go. You can also command other teams to carry out special actions such as throwing a frag grenade, breach charging a door or even disarming a bomb.
I must admit that this is a very very neat feature that will help you in succeeding your mission.
When you have followed all those steps very carefully, it's time to enter the mission.
While playing Rainbow Six you can switching from the 1st person view to the 3rd person perspective.
In some missions you will use more the first person view then the 3rd. I always find that the 1st view is the most intense one. The action is more like in front of you while the 3rd perspective gives you a feeling that the action is miles away. Anyway, thats my impression of any FP game.
Graphics
Rainbow Six features Direct3D accelerated graphics which can be set to multiple resolutions.
Cards such as 3dfx, Nvidia, G200 and many others are supported by the RB6 engine. I played this game with my Monster 3D. Yeah yeah, a old Voodoo I :) but it ran perfectly at 640x480. You might see some roughness on some textures but that will mostly vanish when you set the resolution higher to 800x600 or even higher.
All the textures, from the grass to the buildings or from your characters to the several enemies, they all look superb! When you enter a building you will certainly admire the lovely graphics/textures that they have used. In almost every room there is a different texture used. It looks impressive and you will feel that the Redstorm crew that developed this title have putted a lot of work in the leveldesign and its textures.
Another neat thing that I discovered was that your characters are
actually alive and kicking. Hehe, don't laugh now but let me explain myself. In some games, if it is based on strategy or action it really doesn' matter, your characters don't actually breath. Well, in Rainbow Six, they really are alive. This might be a minor detail to you but for me it was a real pleasure to find out that Redstorm Entertainment has made the effort to create the characters as real as possible.
Ok, you won't find the extreme colored lighting from Quake II, Unreal or special explosion effects from other action games here in Rainbow Six. Why? Because they (the developer) have tried to create a world that's close to the natural environments. And they have succeeded in creating that. So, if you are looking for those gorgeous special effects from Forsaken, Unreal and so on ...don't look any further in this game because they aren't here. Rainbow Six is not created from a fantasy, it's created from a real environment.
 
RB6 can be controlled with the keyboard and your mouse. Its not that easy because this game has a lot of different buttons for different actions such as the Recon, Movement, Team/AI controls, ...
You can setup all your keys manually or you can use the default controls. There were times that I had to look into the manual because I didn't knew what key should be pressed for that particularly command. A bit annoying.
Sound effects and Music
The sound effects in Rainbow Six are very good and so is the speech. However, Redstorm could have used more speech because your enemies and hostages won't respond at all. They don't speak at all. A
pity.
The music score is excellent! It's like a movie soundtrack à la 'The Rock'. I would put it in my drive and listen to it several times. Very very good stuff!
Bugs?
Crashing? Bugs? Well as you might know by now, not every game is perfect. There are always bugs in it and days or months later after the game has shipped, patches are being released.
A fact is that Rainbow Six ain't perfect either. While playing it I had several lock ups. The game would just freeze while it was loading, selecting my team mates or even when I was playing. What the reason was for this freeze I do not know at that time. It occurred several times on voluntary moments.
I noticed on my Win95 taskbar that several programs were running such as Cleansweep, ICQ, the Sidewinder Game Software, Shedule manager and others. So I disable some programs and restarted the game.
After that, I didn't noticed any freeze or other crash. However, I read that some people have a lot of lock ups during the game. If this is now solved with the current US patch that Red Storm Entertainment has released, I do not know since my problem was fixed with disabling some programs. If you have the same problem, try disabling some programs from your taskbar. If that doesn't work, try to install the patch (only for US users) and see what happens. If the lock ups still occur, you should contact the Technical support of Red Storm. They certainly will be able to help you.
Adversarial and Cooperative Multiplayer modes
What would a game be without any Multiplayer support? It would be a crappy game, sir.
So, I am glad to announce that RB6 supports several multiplayer modes. Playing on a Lan, hosting your own server ... it's all possible.
This game offers 2 basic modes of multiplayer. The Adversarial and the Cooperative. In Cooperative games, 8 players can join together to play any single player mission.
In Adversarial games 5 variants are included.
Let me explain:
- The stronghold (one team defends a base area on the map and the other attacks it)
- Double Stronghold (both sides must defend their base and capture the enemy base)
- Survival (ehm do i have to explain this one? Yes? Well, the last man standing wins the mission. Simple
- Team Survival (the first team to eliminate the other side completely wins)
- Double Bluff (very cool) (each side begins with 1 hostage. The object is to capture the other team's hostage and extricate him to your base while precluding the enemy from doing the same to yours. So if any of your team members kills a hostage, you lose.
Another cool feature that is included in the Rainbow Six Multiplayer is the support for MPlayer and the Internet Gaming Zone. Both are excellent for multiplayer battles.
Conclusion
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six from Redstorm Entertainment is a real beauty.
It doesn't have those special effects and extreme colored lighting like Quake II, Forsaken and others but it offers a very detailed look on the natural environments that we see everyday.
It also combines
action and suspense in a RTS game. A great simulation where tactic must be used to complete your mission. Great multiplayer with services such as MPlayer and the Zone will beg you for more. With an excellent soundtrack and good sound effects, well what could you ask more?
I guess nothing ... perhaps you should buy it. It's definitely worth the purchase.
-Bjorn
Ratings
Manual:
88% |
Graphics:
90% |
Music & Sfx:
92% |
GamePlay:
89% |
|
This game scores
on our 5-point Rating System
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