Rainbow Six 3 Preview

We won't be seeing a new Splinter Cell this year, but that game's developer still has an exciting, new Xbox title in store for fans of military-themed action: Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3, a tactical shooter that puts you in charge of a highly trained counterterrorist unit, armed with practically every real-world weapon under the sun. Ubisoft, the game's publisher, emphasizes that Rainbow Six 3 in fact has little in common with this year's PC release, Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield. It's not just a port; instead, it's a new tactical shooter developed specifically for consoles--specifically for the Xbox, for starters, though as with Splinter Cell, Rainbow Six 3 will eventually be ported over to the PlayStation 2 and GameCube next year. However, it seems like Rainbow Six 3 is being designed expressly with the Xbox in mind.

As Ding Chavez, you'll lead Rainbow into a variety of international hotspots. Your training and the element of surprise will help you overcome significant enemy odds.

The Rainbow Six series is credited with popularizing the now-prolific subgenre of realistic, tactical shooters. It started on the PC, and is still best known as a PC franchise, but Rainbow Six 3 for the Xbox may be just the ticket to make "Rainbow Six" a household name among console gamers, as well. The game requires no prior knowledge of the Rainbow Six fiction--it's explained right off the bat that Rainbow is an international counterterrorist unit called in to various global hotspots to take out bad guys, rescue good guys, and defuse bombs--important, covert stuff. In the game, you play as Domingo "Ding" Chavez, probably the most talented warrior in the Rainbow group. That's relative, though, as all of Ding's teammates are highly capable soldiers in their own right and will follow his orders unflinchingly and to the letter.

The game features a training mission that teaches you how to move around (you move the same way you would in Halo or any other shooter for the Xbox) and lets you try out all the different classes of weapons in a firing range. The weapon types here include pistols, submachine guns, shotguns, assault rifles, light machine guns, sniper rifles, and explosives--and, within each category, there's a significant variety to choose from. As a member of Rainbow Six, you're not going to be scavenging weapons out in the field, as you would in other first-person shooters. You'll go into a mission prepared, with whatever gear you're most comfortable with. If you know you'll be heading into urban territory, a sniper rifle and a suppressed sidearm may be just the ticket. If you're expecting a brutal close-quarters battle, a submachine gun or a shotgun may be what you need. The game models each of its numerous weapons in painstaking detail; you can either shoot them from the hip or take aim carefully, raising them to eye level. Each weapon truly has its own unique look and feel, as well as its own unique, loud, clear sound. Yet, if you're not a gun nut and can't appreciate the difference between various classes of submachine gun, you can always jump straight into a mission with Ding's default gear--it'll serve you well enough.

A huge variety of real-world weapons awaits, each with its own unique, realistic strengths and weaknesses.

Being able to jump straight into a mission is one of the key differences between Rainbow Six 3 and other Rainbow Six games. Part of what distinguished the series--and kept it from appealing to fans of more action-oriented shooters--was that it required you to put together a fairly complex mission plan before diving into the action. You needed to plan your attack thoroughly before attempting to execute that plan. Rainbow Six 3 lets you plan on the fly--which perhaps isn't as realistic, but it certainly makes for a better-paced action game. In fact, Rainbow Six 3's real-time squad command system seems to work extremely well. You'll get to command your squad not just through the game's challenging single-player campaign, but also in a variety of custom missions, which will have different enemy placement and can be played through at different levels of difficulty and using different weapons.