Tom Clancy's universe comprised of various novels that were massively successful and would then expand into the world of video games. Stories detailing different terrorist attacks around the world and these were told really well. In the 90s when the First-Person Shooter genre was really kicking the world hard with hits like Doom, Quake and Half Life out came Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six which originally was a novel and then became a video game with a heavy emphasis on tactical gameplay rather than just going in guns blazing. It was a very fresh idea and it pioneered the tactical FPS where it required strategy and planning and the execution made game a universal acclaimed hit for the PC. While Tom Clancy video games are known for Rainbow Six Siege which is a competitive online game still going strong years later especially in tournaments but the series has had a great number of games from the Rainbow Six series to the Ghost Recon series. While these where best experienced on the PC with a Mouse & Keyboard setup and number of these games made their way consoles with the first game in the series ported and developed by different companies. You had Saffire that worked on the Nintendo 64 version, Pipe Dream Interactive that worked on the Sega Dreamcast version and lastly Rebellion that worked on the PlayStation version who are known for hits like Aliens Versus Predator and Judge Dredd Dredd Versus Death. The console versions were not as great as the PC version but where still good games considering the limitations of the platforms but the same cannot be said for the PSOne version. The PlayStation version is a massively striped down version of Rainbow Six that removes all of the important gameplay aspects of the PC game and commits the biggest war crime of being a broken messed up port that is infuriating to play.
The basic plot of the game is that you are part of the special forces organisation Rainbow who is tasked with taking down terrorist organisations like Free Europe (like they could have come up with a lazier name) and the main terrorists the Pheonix Group who are plotting to spread COVID, eh I mean a virus called 'Brahma' which will wipe out the population. You do get Intel before every mission which gives a small brief description into the motivations of the organisations that you are working with and what you are up against and it is reasonably carried out well here.
Now let's think about the positives before moving onto the large lists of negatives with the only positive thing that I can find with this port and that is the gun model actually shows on the screen. Yes, the gun model actually is shown on the screen unlike the real versions of Rainbow Six which do not ever show the gun model at all. While the reloading animations are just basic and also you don't see the hands holding the gun with using some guns like the Shotgun you at least get to see the weapons firing on screen in this version and it is animated well.
Now onto the problems that this game has and trust me there is a laundry list of problems from the utterly disgusting graphics to the broken gameplay and honestly, I don't know where to start with this one. Now Rainbow Six was supposed to be a Tactical First-Person Shooter where the goal is to infiltrate the location, neutralizing terrorists covertly, defusing bombs, rescue hostages while coordinating with your squad to complete objectives. You get a briefing explaining the situation and your mission objectives as well as hearing advice from your superiors, then you get kitted up to prepare for the mission.
You pick your squad members then outfit your squad in either a light, medium or heavy uniform and then choosing a primary weapon, a secondary (or sidearm) weapon and then selecting whatever to have grenades, flashbangs, extra ammo or have a lockpick kit so that you can pick through locked doors faster, a demolitions kit which makes defusing bombs easier, electronics kit which makes handling electronic equipment easier, door charges or a heatbeat sensor which detects nearby enemies. The weapon selection is minimal consisting of six main weapons from submachine guns to a shotgun and three sidearms and some of them have suppressors. Your squad members have stats showing their profession with firearms, grenades, electronics, demolitions and stealth and each of ease vary on what abilities each solider has. One has more skills on defusing bombs while another has more skill with electronics, it gives the idea of what solider to take with you for the required task which makes completing some of the missions easier. Your squad members will take damage during the mission against enemies and their health is carried over from mission to mission unless they are put in reserves so that they can heal for the next mission. Make no mistake Rainbow Six is not an easy game, the gameplay focuses on simulating the realistic tactical aspects rather than relaying on quick reflexes and if you try run and gun your way through a level you alert the enemy which may cause them to shoot a hostage resulting in a mission fail and also you are going to get yourself killed easily. One of the things that made Rainbow Six challenging on PC is that everybody died in one hit, that's right one hit and it's lights out for you. In this version of the game however there is a health bar instead but if one of your squad members is killed, they are gone permanently and is replaced by a reserve troop with low stats unless you chose to reset the mission.
The PlayStation version of this game is challenging but it is challenging and difficult for all of the wrong reasons. Some of the tactical gameplay elements have been carried across to the PlayStation version of this game but mainly weapon spread where the crosshair gets bigger making it difficult to hit enemies while the rest of the tactical gameplay has either been stripped down or removed entirely. Instead of having multiple teams that were handled by two people per team instead you have only just three units that you select and then you pick on the map where you want the three men to be dropped off at and in gameplay you swap back and forth between your three available troops and that's it.
One of the biggest changes, or should I say offender is that this version has none of the mission planning aspect completely removing the tactical gameplay that made Rainbow Six an enjoyable game to begin with. This was where you could plan out the missions by observing the map layout, look at where the enemy and hostages are located around the map, put in way points telling your team members where to go for the objectives, set up go codes which will order the teammates to wait in position for your go before then engaging and executing the objective. This was the most fun and integral part of Rainbow Six where it allowed you to set up and plan missions so that they would go smoothly and ensure the safety of the hostages while also making full use of your team members so that they weren't doing nothing. It was also a system that made you feel that you were the one in charge and calling the shots and the completion of a mission was dependent on how well you placed each of the waypoints out and how you effectively called out to your allies. Ever seen on many, many TV shows and how people in work offices including men and women in the army having strategy and plan meetings explaining what they are going to do and how they are going to do it, well that's because they wrote out different methods that would work best in handling a situation out. If one plan failed, they go to plan B as they said and in Rainbow Six's case if a plan didn't go well, you could change it so that you'd have better results. Like I said before Rainbow Six was never supposed to be a straight up run and gun shooter and instead it was all about simulating the tactical gameplay and mission planning was a great idea to ensure that you completed missions with minimal causalities. Take out the mission planning and what you got is just a simplistic striped down version of Rainbow Six that hardly plays like Rainbow Six at all. This is by far the biggest flaw with this version of Rainbow Six seeing as how all other versions had the tactical gameplay and mission planning from the PC game and removing the mission planning in the PlayStation removes the tactical gameplay and importantly it goes against the point of how Rainbow Six was meant to be played. Too most console players would probably see it as not a big deal seeing it as a way of making it simpler for console players to pick and play it but no that's just missing the point why it was there to begin with.
This wouldn't be an issue if the gameplay was any good but it isn't, you got the objective-based gameplay where you disarm bombs, disable security traps open up locked doors while also shooting at enemies that are present in the area but the gameplay even at its most simplistic form has issues from the controls and mechanics that are just broken. Believe it or not this was the first FPS game on a console to utilize Dual Analog Sticks for movement and aiming on the Dual Shock Controller that would stable for modern FPS games. Left Stick for movement and strafing and the Right Stick for turning, looking and aiming so they got the basics of it right except the control scheme is messed up. On the default control scheme when using the Dual Shock Controller R1 is the Fire Button and R2 changes clips on your currently equipped weapon which are just bad and unreliable but that ain't all. The looking and aiming controls on the Right Analog Stick is inverted meaning that moving the Right Stick up makes you look down and moving it down will make you look up and you can't change it which makes aiming at an enemy more infuriating. Most of the time it either causes you to be facing away from an enemy who is on the stairs about to fire at you or causes you to waste ammo firing at a wall or trying to shoot an enemy who is on the same plane as you and it auto-centres your view when you go forward every time which doesn't help. There is an Auto-Aim system which works poorly and also a Sniper Zoom which helps to get a better shot of an enemy but doesn't help to make aiming any easier. You can turn off the Analog Mode for this game and play with the Dual Shock Controller in Digital Mode as the second control scheme option for the Digital Controller allows the D-pad for movement and the the four face buttons for aiming and turning and surprisingly the Y-axis pitch isn't inverted for it which is plus but again doesn't make aiming any better. No matter what control scheme you use either in Digital Mode or Analog Mode the controls are atrocious and you can't change the Y-axis aiming on the Analog Sticks which makes controlling the game infuriating.
The game's AI is very badly programmed and does reflect on any artificial intelligence but rather artificially idiotic. The enemies can easily spot you even if you are trying to sneak up behind them or from miles and trying to take them out with suppressed weapons but yet their accuracy makes the Stormtroopers marksmen in comparison as they can't aim to hit you till about seconds later. Your allies aren't any better, you can swap back and forth between your three guys as I said before but you can also have them follow you or just leave them on stand-by by interacting with them but however they are a liability because they get stuck around corners get stuck on doors and also take a long time to follow you. Also get this even if you change their weapons to like shotguns they are still carrying and firing MP5's which is just ridiculous and shows off the programmers complete lack of actual programming. Hostages on the other hand have such navigational issues and get stuck constantly that you have to back track several times to see if they gotten the door or not with them getting stuck half the time. These are meant to be the elite special forces operatives and yet they have such difficulty with path-finding and get themselves killed rather easily. There's nothing consistent about the AI if they are getting stuck all of the time but yet somehow managing to spot someone yards away. There is a mission late into the game where it is strictly stealth based and it is a mission fail if you are seen or take out anybody in the area, you're meant to try and lure the enemies away so that you can make it through but at times enemies either stay in their positions or walk slowly or come out so quickly that they can spot you every time making the level an absolute pain to get through without trial and error. Using flashbangs doesn't help because it takes too long to use them as you have to hold down the fire button for whatever time to prepare the strength for throwing then waiting like three seconds to finally throw it and then detonate, usually sometimes right in your face blinding you and not the enemy. You're better off just shooting the enemies directly and praying that you shoot them fast enough before they shoot you or shoot the hostage.
What's worse the gameplay is just incredibly broken, I lost count at the number of times that I have been stuck trying to get through the doors or trying to climb up the ladders, times enemies instantly just shot me without any indication, there's random glitches and so on. It's a barely functional mess of a game that suffers hard from the stripped-down gameplay with majority of it being absolutely broken. The game has about 14 missions in total and the three difficulty options that make enemies able to shoot you and add more objectives to make the game harder but the challenge comes from having to deal with terrible controls, badly programmed AI, broken gameplay and all of the aspects that made Rainbow Six a well-received PC game gone. Because of all that you are going to end up losing one or two of your guys, dying and having to restart over and over. It doesn't matter if you get one or two objectives done you screw up any of your objectives or die you are back to the beginning of the mission and with how absolutely awful and broken it is you are in a for completely frustrating experience and you are going to fail a lot.
If the broken gameplay isn't enough to convince you to abort mission, then the graphics will certainly make you do it because this version of Rainbow Six has some of the most awful and worst looking character models on the PlayStation. The low-resolution models look like a pile of poorly rendered pixelated blobs that were made in like ten minutes. The Biosuit uniformed guys look like hunchbacks, the uniforms with gasmasks look more like cartoony fly faces like it makes you question what is that supposed to be? And lastly the jungle camo looks like a Freddy Krueger costume that was made in a cheap Halloween shop or something and they just look really terrible. Also, no effort was put into the animation either because all of them animate at about 5 frames per second and they are super jerky. The environment doesn't look any better and the amount of green you're going to see from wearing the night vision goggles just to be able to see anyone in dark areas is going to strain your eyes even with the amount of darkness that plenty of the game's levels has. Look I know the original PlayStation console didn't have the best 3D graphic capabilities available due to technical limitations but there were PSOne games before this that handled 3D graphics well. Rainbow Six on the PlayStation just looks unbelievably bad even for PlayStation standards this was released in 1999 a year after it was released on PC.
1999 was also the same year that EA (the company we all know and hate) released Medal of Honor for the PlayStation and it was a masterpiece, it helped properly pioneer the Dual Analog Stick control scheme that modern FPS gamers know and had the controls where they should be even though you had to select it in the options menu. R2 for Firing, using the Zoom Aiming on the L2 button and so on and it is so easy to get the hang of and plus you have the options of inverting the Y-Axis aiming if you wish. It's was a fantastic control scheme that was further popularized by Time Splitters and Red Faction on the PS2 and lastly the original XBox with Halo Combat Evolved. So, the PlayStation version of Rainbow Six did it first but Medal of Honor did it right. As soon as Medal of Honor was released it made all other FPS games on the PlayStation obsolete including this game which is just a total abomination in comparison.
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six on the PlayStation has little to no redeemable qualities aside from the gun model showing on screen, the loading screen animations and maybe the voice samples and the soundtrack (that only plays whenever it feels like it). It's a massive train wreck of a port that suffers from a total complete lack of the tactical gameplay and mission aspects that made Rainbow Six enjoyable, broken gameplay, controls that make aiming infuriating, AI that is very badly programmed and it has really terrible graphics with the worst character models even for a PSOne game. What angers me most with this game is that someone thought this broken and worthless version of Rainbow Six was good enough to be brought to the PSN Store as a PSOne Classic and also that same person thought it would be good to bring it to the PlayStation Classic Mini console over some of the other PSOne games that deserved to be on there instead like Silent Hill, Castlevania Symphony of the Night, Gran Turismo and so on. Even some Japanese titles like Parasite Eve that was only on the Japanese PlayStation Classic would have been a better option to have on the English PSClassic over this accursed abomination. The PSOne did later get two more Rainbow Six games one of these being a version of Rogue Spear developed by Saffire instead of Rebellion which is actually good and is a much more improved game that's far better than this travesty.
I still recommend that you check out Rainbow Six though wherever it is on the PC or playing the Nintendo 64 and SEGA Dreamcast ports as they actually have the tactical gameplay that made the game really amazing and are worth checking out but the PlayStation version is best avoided. It's the worst version of the original Rainbow Six game in every way possible and it is not even worth the curiosity or worth the headaches, jokes, chuckles or time to invest purchasing just to see how Rebellion ruined the game in so many fundamental ways. With how broken and striped down Rainbow Six is on PSOne you have full authority and permission to abort the mission and to terminate that operative immediately.
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Game Score: 2.0/10
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Game Title: Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six
Platform: PlayStation (PSOne)
Developer: Rebellion
Genre: First Person Shooter
Age Rating: ELSPA: 11+
Release Date: November 1999
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The Good Points:
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1. The Gun Model is shown on the screen
The Bad Points:
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1. You cannot plan your missions out how you would them to go
2. Atrocious controls with no option to turn off the inverted Y-axis making aiming infuriating
3. Badly programmed AI
4. Really terrible graphics and horrible character models
5. Very, Very Broken Gameplay
6. It removes the most important tactical aspects that made Rainbow Six unique and enjoyable
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Reviewed by: Anthony Hayball (AQWBlaZer91)
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