Business-savvy or not, Xbox owners just have to appreciate the relationship between Microsoft and UbiSoft. Starting with the outstanding Splinter Cell, UbiSoft’s "Tom Clancy" games have rolled onto Xbox with all the subtlety of a hardcover novel dropped on your baby toe. The most recent to appear, Ghost Recon: Island Thunder, expanded upon the multi-squad gameplay of the original Ghost Recon and revitalized an Xbox Live service that quite frankly needed a shot in arm.
This holiday season, yet another Tom-Clancy franchise, Rainbow Six, will make its debut on Xbox. And yet again, Xbox owners have great things to look forward to. We’ve run a preview build of Rainbow Six through the wringer, and suffice it to say, you should start donating blood now, because this is yet one more game you need to buy before 2004 comes around.
As PC gamers have known for years, the recipe for the Rainbow Six franchise calls for a pinch of stealth (a la Splinter Cell), two cups of international terrorists gone amok and a full pound of team-based strategy (a la Ghost Recon). Playing the role of Domingo "Ding" Chavez, the leader of an international anti-terrorist squad, you’ll guide your team through hostage-rescuing scenarios, bomb-defusing missions, out-and-out assaults and other appropriately top-secret tasks.
While this may sound like a Ghost Recon rehash, Rainbow Six is an entirely unique game for several reasons. For starters, where the levels in Ghost Recon covered serious outdoor acreage, the levels in Rainbow Six reflect missions that would be appropriate for a SWAT-like team such as yours. In other words, levels incorporate the great outdoors, but they generally involve close quarters and alleyways where quiet, methodical movement is the name of the game.
From a gameplay standpoint, it’s also different in that the game involves one squad rather than two, in that players can’t switch between members of the team, and that the tasks you need to achieve have a near-absolute reliance on teamwork.
Since you can only play as Ding, issuing orders to your teammates is imperative to accomplishing your tasks. The commands are all pretty basic, not to mention intuitive. Look in a certain direction, and you can command your squad to "move." Look at a door, and you can have them open it and clear the room. Or open it and toss in a flash grenade. Or open it and throw a frag grenade. Or breach it with explosives and charge in with guns blazing. In a nutshell, if it’s a command you could give in real life, you’ll find it in the video game.
Those commands are expanded ten-fold in their realism, though, by one incredible feature: voice commands. Since SOCOM first wowed gamers on the PS2, Xbox owners have been pining for an offline game that makes good use of the Communicator. Finally, that game is arriving. With Rainbow Six, you can yell at your computer-controlled teammates to "go, go, go!" or "cover me," and they’ll actually listen to your order. Adding to the immersion, though, is that you don’t have to memorize specific commands, because the voice-recognition is context sensitive. There have been several scenarios where I’ve said "Dieter, I need you to cover me" and he’s responded with "Roger, Ding, I’ve got your six."
Since it was an early build, there were a few times when the voice-recognition went a bit wonky ("move" somehow was translated as "hold position"), but by the time the game hits stores those issues should be ironed out. There were also a few team-AI issues, where the team would frag and clear the same room three times or, worse yet, run into the room and toss a grenade back at me, but those are little details that UbiSoft will no doubt fix before the ship date.
Graphically, Rainbow Six 3 is heads and shoulders above Ghost Recon in detail and quality, and keep in mind that what we saw was a pre-release build. There was more than one occasion, in fact, where it looked like UbiSoft had slipped in a level from Splinter Cell, and not just because one mission takes place in an oil refinery. The lighting is moody, the physics are incredible, the environments are semi-destructible (exploding oil barrels), and the game has a visual pizzazz unmatched by even the most recent Xbox shooters.
Add to this incredible single-player experience the promise of online multiplayer, and Rainbow Six 3 is destined to appear on several Game of the Year lists. If you were skeptical about UbiSoft’s ability to deliver another great "Tom Clancy" game to the Xbox, allow me to ease your anxiety. Rainbow Six 3 is most definitely going to be worth the wait.
