Best Mobile Game
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3
Publisher: Gameloft
Developer: Gameloft
Read our preview from E3 2004 >>
Why does yet another Gameloft Tom Clancy title deserve the Big Enchilada from E3? They've done the premise to death--clandestine superoperatives protecting our way of life from a wide assortment of malevolent ideologues, over and over again. And yet, no matter how many times the French developer alerts us to a new geopolitical hot zone that needs infiltrating, we come back salivating, our phones at the ready.
In this case, Gameloft has applied a different spin to its usual stealth-game formula by including team mechanics--you can pick and choose anywhere from one to four soldiers to man your terrorist-wrecking crew. More importantly, you can rely on the solid character AI to get the job done on both sides of the ski mask. Your team members will react adroitly to combat situations based on the orders you give them, and the bad guys have grown quite a bit smarter than they were in their last clandestine bit of skulduggery. Guards from many similar games seem to possess the perceptive and analytical faculties of the Keystone Kops, but not these guys; they'll respond to errant gunshots like wildfire, and if you get too tricky they'll use radio communication to call for backup or instruct their fellows to kill hostages and detonate bombs. These changes are striking because they make RS3 look and feel like it is populated by actual characters, rather than the one-dimensional sprites that grace most mobile titles.
The attribute that pushes RS3 over the top, however, is its innovative cursor-based interface. If you click on any object, a slick circular menu pops up offering you a range of contextual choices, some of which combine frequently used actions. For instance, you can open a door and chuck one of several different types of grenades using one command. Furthermore, the cursor itself will change depending on the situation: If you have an opportunity to stab an unsuspecting guard, for instance, the cursor will change to a little knife icon when it's maneuvered over the victim. It's possible to play this relatively complex title with one hand, which is an impressive feat of design all by itself.
All told, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3 gets our nod for Mobile's Best of E3 because its under-the-hood improvements and novel gameplay tweaks convincingly make an old premise new again. We are looking forward to this game in the next few months, and you should be too.
The other Best Mobile Game finalists:
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