Currently scheduled for release in mid-March, Rainbow Six: Lockdown is the latest tactical shooter in Ubisoft's Tom Clancy-inspired series. The game promises to introduce a number of new features to what has proved to be a winning formula for Ubisoft and developer Red Storm, and it will offer a very different multiplayer experience according to which console you're playing the game on. We'd give anything to be able to tell you that Lockdown is shaping up to be a worthy successor to Rainbow Six 3, but, based on the work-in-progress PS2 and Xbox versions that we've been playing (and the fact that the release date is less than a month away), it's hard to say just how the game is going to turn out.

We've spent the majority of our time with Rainbow Six: Lockdown playing through the first few missions of the single-player campaign mode, which are set in Pretoria, South Africa; Amsterdam, Netherlands; and Edinburgh, Scotland. The locales are every bit as varied as you'd expect them to be, but, with the exception of a few set pieces (and sniper sections), we unfortunately can't say the same about the gameplay, which is still rough around the edges.

Giving orders to colleagues couldn't be easier.

Although issuing orders to your colleagues (who move as a group and cannot be given individual orders) couldn't be easier--you simply tap your action button to have them move to the position you're pointing at and hold the button down to bring up a number of different options relating to the area or object that your sights are focused on--the game's AI is still a mixed blessing. While the AI is capable of some very useful actions, its breadth is not impressive. When you approach a door, for example, you could open it yourself (instantly or gradually), or you could choose to have your colleagues open it normally, open it with a shotgun, knock it down with a hammer, or even breach it with an explosive charge. Furthermore, at the same time you're instructing them how to open the door, you can tell them what to do next: hold their positions, enter and clear the room, or preface the entering and clearing with a frag grenade or flashbang. So, when it comes to opening doors, Rainbow is definitely the right team for the job. It's some of the other stuff that its members have trouble with.

The fundamental problem we're seeing right now is that while you can easily order your colleagues to move to a specific location, you have no control over the positions that they adopt when they arrive. So, if you order the three of them to go and stand behind a parked vehicle, for example, one of them will most likely do just that, but the other two will take up positions nearby that in no way take into account the locations of enemies or the fact that thin air makes for lousy cover. Lockdown would certainly benefit if a Full Spectrum Warrior-style control scheme were implemented, allowing you to determine the positions of your colleagues when moving them. Nevertheless, Rainbow operatives do a good job of looking busy when you move them into position, and, provided they're facing the right way, they'll often pick off (or at least spot) any nearby enemies before you've even had a chance to. We found that our colleagues did a good job of putting bullet holes into all kinds of other things too--basically anything that came between them and an enemy they had spotted, such as a wall that the enemy was taking cover behind or even a vehicle that the Rainbow operative in question was standing behind. In short, our colleagues' proficiency with weapons was occasionally so good that we had very little to do, and on other occasions it was so bad that we felt like we were babysitting them. Ubisoft and Red Storm are no doubt working to make the behavior of CPU-controlled characters in Rainbow Six: Lockdown more realistic, and we sincerely hope that they manage it, because it will certainly make or break the game as far as the single-player experience is concerned.

Your colleagues' firearm skills are inconsistent at best.

Surprisingly, the level that we've had the most fun with to date is the only one we've played that effectively does away with the tried-and-tested Rainbow Six formula. We are talking about one of the game's numerous sniper missions, namely the first one you'll play, which is set in Amsterdam. Your first glimpse of Amsterdam in Rainbow Six: Lockdown comes from inside a helicopter flying high above the city from which you'll use your sniper rifle to pick off any enemies that threaten the progress of your Rainbow colleagues on the ground--including other snipers. After a couple of minutes the helicopter drops you on a rooftop, at which point your job gets a lot harder because you'll need to find your own vantage points and move between them regularly to keep your colleagues safe. When you successfully see team Rainbow to its destination, you'll step out of your sniper shoes and back into those of the team's leader, at which point Amsterdam plays a lot like the rest of the levels, with plenty of narrow corridors, closed doors, and hostage situations to deal with.