A great mix of realistic tactics and brutal firefights.
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Pros:
+ Brutal Action: Because of its revamped graphics and presentation (including finally being able to see your own weapon, which was inexplicable in its absence from the previous games), the enemy encounters are far more savage than previous games in the series, making for a much more fun and involving experience.
+ Intricate Planning: You can go into great detail when planning your missions, and there's nothing like seeing a well-thought out plan being carried out to perfection!
+ Improved FPS Gameplay: There are endless little changes to the action phase, such as the ability to issue on-the-fly orders, smoothly half-open doors, and switch between members of an individual team: and they all add up to a much more satisfying experience than ever before.
+ Tense: The fact that you have to get through a mission in one straight go without saving, combined with the unpredictable brutality of the sporadic gunfights (one-shot kills are frighteningly common) and the thick atmosphere of the levels, makes the game almost unbearably tense most of the time - don't be surprised if you find yourself jumping and spraying bullets everywhere in a panic!
+ Longveity: There's lots to be done once the main campaign is finished (which takes a long time indeed), with all kinds of extra missions and difficulties available, not to mention multiplayer.
Cons:
- Difficulty: While it's part of what makes the game so tense, the difficulty can feel unfairly steep sometimes, even on lower settings, with some situation seeming utterly impossible to escape without friendly casualties; and if you're obsessive about making sure your entire team survives each mission (like me), then you're going to have to do a whole lot of stopping and restarting...
- AI: The enemy and friendly AI generally leaves a lot to be desired, which can be very frustrating regarding your team-mates: while they can be pretty effective, they sometimes respond very poorly to enemy fire, and the slow clunkiness with which they carry out some orders (such as any kind of grenade-assisted entry) can cause fatally annoying setbacks in your plan.
- Weapon Selection: While I do love that there's such an insanely large variety of weapons to choose from, it does have its issues - not only are a large chunk of them comparitively useless next to the others, but the selection process is also in need of streamlining, as it takes a lot of looking back and forth to work out the differences between more similar guns.
- Questionable Camouflage Effectiveness: I really can't be sure, but does your choice of camouflage really make any difference at all? There are times when I've been spotted from half a mile away while wearing the most ideal camouflage possible in the game, so I'm not convinced...
- Reduced Team Count: In the previous games you could have up to 4 seperate teams: now it's been reduced to 3. Why reduce the tactical options?
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Overall, if you want a great combination of tactical planning and intense, realistic action, you can't do much better than Raven Shield. I never got round to playing the following games in the series, but I hear they ditched the planning aspect and focused strictly on the action; while I can understand this given how satisfying the action became in Raven Shield, it still feels a shame to skip out on the most mentally rewarding element of the game, and the part that made the series stand out so much to begin with. So if you want the classic, tense Rainbow Six combat, but still want to meticulously plan every last detail, this is the one for you!