Rainbow Six 3, like a game of golf can be an infuriating, but at the same time rewarding experience.
This review covers all three games ... one could say R6:3 is the "common system" and Raven Shield, Athena Sword and Iron Wrath are its "mission packs" so a combined review is justifiable. For the record I own the R6:3 Gold Edition and have Iron Wrath via the free download and this review can be found under Raven Shield, Athena Sword and R6:3 Gold; separate reviews are arguably redundant in terms of the games' common pros and cons if you have played the trilogy.
Apologies, and a caveat to my review, but for me R6 Lockdown and the two Vegas games are my preferred R6 vehicles.
BACKSTORY and MISSION SETTINGS
Raven Shield and its sister games have a reasonable (if far fetched) narrative involving neo-fascists, nuclear and biological terrorists and/or criminal masterminds that develops over the course of the campaign missions. There are some good cut-scenes to lend some pre- and post-mission immediacy to the missions you will undertake or have completed.
Raven Shield has 15 missions spanning the globe, well mainly Europe, Carribbean and South America. Athena Sword has 8 missions, continuing the Raven Shield narrative, but set in and around Mediterranean Europe. Iron Wrath has 7 missions set in the old Eastern Bloc and former Soviet Union; which as we all know suggests the Bush-Cheney nightmare of terrorists and nukes. Fear not, Rainbow Six is ready and willing to protect the free world against this axis of evil and their WMDs!
Missions are set in a variety of interesting and very detailed environments: oil refineries, hotels, banks, airports (including terminal, hangars and runway areas), warehouses, container terminals, tunnels, as well as picture postcard city streets and markets. Well worth exploring ... not that you have much time to smell the roses in a Rainbow Six mission!
A chronological tabulation of the missions in Raven Shield, Athena Sword and Iron Wrath and Lockdown, can be found here:
http://roguespear.3dretreat.com/rainbowmissions.htm
My owned games cover mission 57onwards.
GAMEPLAY and GUNPLAY
"Your mission is to eliminate the terrorists and rescue the hostages ..." Arguably this premis can be somewhat repetitive BUT R6:3, across the three self-contained campaigns, provides a variety of mission locales and challenges. You will "manage" (meaning plan for and/or control) up to three teams that work in conjunction to accomplish the mission. Normally your character will lead one of the teams (but you can switch between characters within a team and between teams) with the AI running the other team(s) based on pre-prepared (in-built or player made) mission plans. Herein lies the problem: not always are the plans or team and weapons selections perfect. You however have the ability to change the plans, team members and weapons loadouts to suit each mission. No two play throughs are ever the same so developing the perfect plan and/or perfect execution of the plan is elusive at best (discussed at some length below).
Essentially each mission is undertaken by one to three teams (Red, Green and Gold) and as noted above the player can directly control one team at a time but can swap between teams. Each team member has his or her own biography/back story and what an international lot they are! Individual team members have particular rated strengths and weaknesses in assault combat,
stealth, demolitions, leadership and technological capability . Each member of each team can be customised with weapons and equipment loadouts and clothing to suit the specific mission. There is a vast selection of weapons to choose from, including pistols, SMGs, assault rifles, shotguns, LMGs, sniper rifles, grenades, flashbangs, listening devices, etc.
I came into the Rainbow Six (R6) series via Lockdown and then moved on to Vegas and Vegas 2. I've now completed the R6:3 trilogy, starting with Raven Shield. From the outset I must disclose that the much vaunted pre-mission planning segment left me very cold. I used the pre-generated plans (with some very minor tweaks) rather than develop my own from scratch. Fans of the original/earlier R6 games miss this aspect in Lockdown and the subsequent games. Controlling a team on-mission is a sufficient "tactical shooter" experience for me. Developing the plan itself is perhaps too much like micro-management for me ... you need to leave some decisions to the guys in the field. A plan is out-dated as soon as it's completed (that's what an engineer would say, and I am one).
These games are pretty tough to get through with your whole team intact. If you "accept" the mission result any KIA team characters are no longer selectable for future missions (unlike GRAW where your characters automatically resurrect for the next mission). What I generally did was use one of the generic "Assault #X" guys as "my character" and use it to lead the mission for one of the teams. This allows you to preserve the "name characters" for key support roles (or leading the other teams). I recommend a play through or two with the automatically generated teams and then pick the one that encounters the most AI challenges (ie loses most team members/hostages) and use your generic character to lead that team. I, for as long as possible, avoided accepting a mission in which more than one non-generic character is lost per team of four. This however lead to premature hair loss and gnashed teeth. Wounded (incapacitated) characters become available again after a couple of missions.
Note that there ar NO in-game saves ... each mission is played through to its conclusion, whether success, partial success (mission completed, but with losses) or failure. So after making the conscious decision to use only the installed mission plans I played all the campaigns missions in the trilogy, eventually deciding for sanity's sake to accept mission outcomes where I had lost one or more operatives. Having "evolved" from FPS to tactical shooters ... I find that as you are "responsible" for (and need to "rely" on) more than one character it is inherently more challenging (and fun) to get a team, rather than individual, through! However, unlike the other tactical shooters I have played, I eventually forced myself to "let go" in R6:3 and accept team casualties ... it was just too frustrating trying to advance in the campaign otherwise.
If you find that the campaigns become too tedious then there are a number of enjoyable custom games using campaign and multiplayer maps. These are either team based terrorist hunt or hostage rescue missions as well as "lone wolf" (solo) missions which mainly involve traversing the map eliminating tangos on the way before reaching the "green smoke" extraction point. My recommendation, with hindsight is to play the campaign through on "easy" to unlock the mission maps and then replay them on your preferred difficulty setting. I tried playing the Raven Shield campaign a number of times on what I would normally consider my default level, "veteran", but this was just too hard without losing a significant number of team members or too many repetitive replays.
I've tried most of the weapon choices, including the various assault rifles and SMGs in the FPS single player style "lone wolf" missions ... which are "fun" in their own way ... the real bonus is you get to try out a few interesting maps not in the main campaign storylines. Certainly R6:3 has a great armoury and picking the right combination of what to take on a mission for each team member is part of the fun of this otherwise, debatably, unforgiving game.
SO, WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE GAME?
Personally I think the idea of having and/or leading more than one team on a different set of waypoints and mission objectives is great. But the problem, or challenge, is in the planning and execution of these missions. Non-player (AI) controlled teams have at best a 50:50 chance of success no matter how you tweak them or the mission plans. R6 Lockdown or R6 Vegas, for me, is the better GAMING experience in that you only control one team but can split them, to successfully take down a room for example. Whereas in R6:3 with up to three teams you are relying, based on my observations, on the programing to generate what are at best "random outcomes" for the AI controlled teams.
As indicated in my blog (3 April 2009) I avoided the pre-mission planning and have run with the pre-generated plans. It's debatable whether it is worth the time (and effort) to make your own co-ordinated plan for up to three teams. Obviously those that have played the original R6 games will say this is the best part of the game. Personally I have opted for trying to perfect the execution of the pre-generated plans rather than trying to perfect the planning. This runs counter to my own training (being an engineer) but the pre-mission training interface demands much more time than I'm prepared to invest ... so the most I have done is edit a few of the plans but not create one from scratch.
Like golf, no matter how much time you put in at the driving range hitting the ball just so, once you tee up for a game things can go very well or very badly ... it's amazing to me how many times a R6 AI team will either hook or slice rather than land on the fairway. However with two supporting AI teams the chance that both will land on the fairway seems less than 50/50. So you are faced with switching teams between "Go Go" codes or "holding" all teams and then playing with one to the next "Go Go" code location.
My main problem with the game is with the level of frustration it can create. As noted I use the in-built mission plans and tweak the personnel and weapons selections. What I have noticed is that when you use the "observor mode" to watch the team(s) perform the missions you can end up with widely conflicting outcomes, even when the mission succeeds. I use this system to get a feel for the "lie of the land" and determine which team hits the most "problems" and then lead that team for the relevant part(s) of the mission. However the outcomes are inconsistent as the same plan running on "auto" in observer mode can be extremely varied: from all team members killed, to some team members killed, to no team members killed. Try observor mode yourself to see what I mean.
This in my mind should speak volumes to those who regale us lesser mortals who do not invest hours and days trying to develop that perfect R6:3 "take down" plan. The friendly and enemy AI is either smarter (or dumber) than we may think and there is no perfect plan, or indeed with hindsight, execution. This suggests the outcomes of missions played with more than one team will encounter the same "randomness" of outcomes. I recall playing and replaying and replaying again the final two missions in Raven Shield having to decide whether I would accept the mission outcome ... the first time I lost two team members and I didn't accept, the second time one entire team and the third time all members of both teams. This is why the game was frustrating for me. In the end I just decided to accept a mission outcome that showed 3 KIA and 2 WIA as acceptable just to get on with the game. As noted earlier one does care for the characters ... but one, in the end, must accept "unacceptable" losses or go mad! This is discussed, somewhat tongue in cheek, in my very "zeitgeist" 31 August 2009 blog and readers
comments. As things ultimately transpired I only had 4 operatives KIA over the 8 missions in Athena Sword and 2 KIA over 7 missions in Iron Wrath so I felt a great sense of success after the trials of Raven Shield.
So to conclude with a golf analogy: no matter how you address the ball (plan the mission) it is possible that you may hook or slice the ball and end up in the rough or a bunker and not on the green. Rainbow Six 3 is a difficult, almost impossible, game to play IF you intend to preserve your team. If you are willing to grudgingly accept some losses (some WIAs or at worst some KIAs) you will have more hair left and your teeth won't be ground down to dust.
OK, WELL WHAT'S GOOD ABOUT IT THEN?
In one word: REPLAYABILITY. The campaign must be completed for the related missions to be unlocked. Once unlocked you have a number of very well rendered locations in which to carry out the various custom missions and of course replay those troublesome missions. Pick a map, whether from the campaign missions or from the multiplayer selection, populate it with tangoes, pick you weapons and/or fellow team memeber and away you go. Now the game takes on more of a FUN aspect compared to playing the missions.
The missions within the campaign are inherently replayable ... this is perhaps a self-driven need to have a "Mission Completed" result but with no KIAs. So you will find yourself replaying the missions whether by changing which team(s) you actively play (versus those left to AI), and/or by changing the team members or their weapons' loadouts to find that elusive combination that will see the team(s) through to success.
Another plus is REALISM ... that means the actual gameplay, missions, weapons and team characters. Your team characters, as previously mentioned, have individual backstories and strengths and weaknesses ... they are not "cookie cutter" characters as occurs in many games. While the current spate of "trerrorist era" games are similar on many levels, the locations and goals in the R6 series are sufficiently varied to leave lasting appeal. The weapons ... well you have a virtual armoury of modern tactical weaponry to equip your team(s) with to help them survive in the intense close quarters engagements they will be inserted into.
CAVEAT
Things that I dislike about the game, such as the ability to alter or create mission plans, are what others enjoy immensely. All opinions are subjective and as such are equally valid. The overwhelming weight of opinion is that R6: 3 is a great game ... some just like (or dislike) different aspects of it. R6: 3 has been thoroughly reviewed here at GameSpot ... see what others think and if you feel the game has something that may appeal give it a go and tell the rest of us what YOU think.
SUMMARY
R6:3 at its best provides the tactical shooter fan a GREAT series of missions that rely on real world weapons and tactics to successfully execute plans. The problem is, perhaps a self imposed one being, the expectation (or desire) to complete these missions without losing any team members. This can ultimately, as the missions get more difficult later in each campaign, become an exercise in futility. That said the R6:3 gameplay is very good, if unforgiving, and the environments are both detailed and interesting. Soundtrack, apart from team to team comms and enemy AI chatter, is quite minimal.
It is perhaps understandable why some see R6:3 as the epitome of the R6-series of tactical shooter games, but for me, entering the series from the wrong chronological end, the "better" games began with R6 Lockdown with a single player controlled team and no friendly AI "hindrances". Arguably you can't really go wrong with a Tom Clancy Rainbow Six title if you enjoy playing solid tactical shooters ... it just depends on your taste for how much pre-mission involvement you want.
R6:3 is however well worth playing. Once the single player campaign is completed its component missions are available for replay in a number of formats ... you can even redo those missions that kept going horribly wrong with a selection of the better "named" assault team members once again available (or is it reincarnated?). Multiplayer? It has that capability but I've not explored it ... there are sufficient single player maps and missions, as well as some excellent multiplayer maps set in exotic climes, to try out in the various lone wolf, terrorist hunt, hostage rescue and custom mission replay modes.
R6:3 Gold is indeed a "box full of goodies".
Note: the FREE R6:3 add-on expansion pack, Iron Wrath, is available here: http://www.fileplanet.com/promotions/ironwrath/