Tom Clancy's anti-terrorist novel Rainbow Six crosses over from novel to tactical action game and finally to the Mac with MacSoft's recent port of the PC hit. As a member of the counter strike team called Rainbow, your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to save innocent lives and neutralize terrorist threats.
Almost immediately, you will realize that Rainbow Six is very different from all those first-person shooters: no "respawning" here. Get hit once and you're usually dead. Often you'll get killed by tangos (terrorists) before you even see them.
Dying, a lot, is something you'll have to get used to. By the time I'd reached the fifth mission, most of my primary characters were listed as K.I.A., and I was left only with "reserve" characters. Computer controlled members of my team often fare as badly as I do, and I have the feeling that real life counter-terrorist work is just as dangerous.
For dyed-in-the-wool "sim" fans Rainbow Six will be a fantastic experience. A wealth of detail surrounds each weapon, character and location. You can spend 80% of gameplay analyzing intelligence reports, planning your attack with the help of blueprints of the area, selection your eight team members and equipping them with the perfect weapons for the job.
Arm yourself
Briefing - Each level begins with a briefing sequence brings you up to speed on the current terrorist threat, and instructs you on your mission objectives, which will differ depending on what difficultly level you've selected. Rainbow's senior operative John Clark is on hand to give you specific advice regarding the mission.
Intel - The second step in the planning phase of your mission gives you access to Rainbow Control's intelligence database, which includes various info under the headings of people, organizations, newswire and misc. Any new information in the database that applies direction to your mission, such as information on a particular hostage, will be called up by default.
Roster Selection - A crucial part of planning an operation is picking your eight team members. In the roster screen, you can scroll through the entire list of Rainbow operatives, view their stats, history and medical information and decide which operatives best suit the current mission.
Kit - In this screen, you assign your team members with appropriate weapons and equipment. Characters are able to carry a primary weapon (usually a sub-machine gun of some kind), a secondary weapon like a pistol, and have two spare pockets for flashbangs, grenades or extra ammunition. Also available are specialized equipment such as motion sensors, bomb disarm or lockpicking kits and explosives suited for blowing open doors.
It's important to pay careful attention to the details of your mission while choosing your equipment. If the situation calls for extreme stealth, obviously weapons with a silencer will serve you better. Likewise, if there are numerous civilian hostages you probably won't be lobbing grenades around. Also keep in mind: the more you carry, the more noise you make when you move.
Team Assignment - From this screen you can break up your team into smaller groups that will later have individual orders. You can create up to four teams.
Plan - Here's where we get into the real nitty-gritty of the planning stage. You plot the movements of your teams on blueprint or map of the area. With the help of recon information (the accuracy of which varies depending on your difficultly level), possible terrorist, hostage and bomb locations will be marked, allowing you to plan which teams should go where and when.
To illustrate, you could order Green team to proceed through the back door, Red team through the fire escape, and have them both converge in the main hallway at a waypoint where they would wait for your go order, presumably after other teams are in position, before continuing. Between the waypoints, team members operate under strick Rules of Engagement (ROE). The ROE defines how computer controlled team members will react in combat. Behaviors range from aggressively engaging any hostile in the area to avoiding them, to escorting hostages away from the area. You can change the ROE at any waypoint.
Execute - The last stage of any plan: actually carrying it out. From here the player takes on the role of the team leader, and the game moves into first- or third-person shooter style.
Fortunately, for people who'd rather just go shoot bad guys without getting totally involved in the planning, you can skip over the other stages and go directly to Execute by using preset plans.
One of the ultra-realistic features that Rainbow Six sports weapon targeting. In most games, you have your regular crosshairs, and what you aim at is what you hit. But with Rainbow Six you have a circular crosshair that expands and contracts depending on your character's marksmanship stats, fatigue level, injury and movement. If you're running the crosshairs will expand considerably, relaying the relative difficulty of hitting the target.
I found it disappointing that the terrorist behave in a rather static way. This hampers the replay and realism value. If you fail a mission and then retry it, you'll find all the enemies in exactly the same spot as last time. The only exception is for roaming tangos, but they too will always walk in the same direction. Changing the difficultly level gets around this problem somewhat, but is no substitue for a randomness.
Multiplayer, particularily over a LAN where you're close enough together to talk to everyone, adds a greater feeling of realism to Rainbow Six. Teamwork takes on a new and complicated dimension when your team members are thinking with real human grey matter instead of silicon. GameRanger is also included to make finding games on the net a whole lot easier.
As far as graphics go, Rainbow Six is beginning to show its age, having originally been released more than a year ago on the PC side, with flat, repeating textures. Owners of Voodoo II cards won't be able to watch the cinematics and will have problems with artifacts created by the cursor in the briefing screens. It does run acceptably on a RagePro system, although in this game the graphics are far secondary to gameplay.
The Last Word
Sim fans will be thrilled with the high level of detail surrounding every aspect of the planning stage. Casual players may find it a little daunting however, making Rainbow Six not a game for everyone. If you're just looking for a first person shooter with a good story line, steer clear of this one. But if an in-depth, tactical, anti-terrorist simulation is what your after, Rainbow Six is right on target.
Included with Rainbow Six is the extra mission pack Eagle Watch which takes you to some exotic locales, like a Russian space shuttle, China's Forbidden City and the Taj Mahal, to continue the war against terrorism.
