After a long and distinguished career on the PC, Tom Clancy’s wildly popular first-person shooter series Rainbow Six has come to the Xbox. What’s more, Xbox is the only place you’ll see it in the foreseeable future. In Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six® 3, you control the members of Team Rainbow, an international squad of highly trained, counter terrorism operatives who find and solve problems that most governments don’t even hear about.
This time around, super sniper Ding Chavez and the rest of Team Rainbow (Louis Loiselle, Dieter Weber, and Eddie Price … they have an entirely new set of missions and challenges that will test your strategic skills, leadership ability, and fighting prowess. The single-player game features more than a dozen high-stakes, nitro-burning combat missions that require you not just to shoot, but also use your team.
The Rainbow connection.
The developers at Ubisoft Montreal answered the challenge of bringing the highly realistic, squad-based first-person shooter to the Xbox by focusing on what worked in the PC version and then improving it. Pre-mission planning has been simplified, as has the quick order interface which you use to control the rest of your team. Interacting with the environment is context-sensitive, with over 60 available squad commands. When you look at an object only the four most appropriate commands appear as options. If there’s a closed door, you can throw it open and storm in or slowly open it and toss in a stun grenade. If you are ever feel outgunned, you can order your team to go in with guns blazing or hold back and snipe from afar.
A standard slate of powerful weapons and items are back from the PC version, including over 30 rifles and pistols, along with grenades, grenade launchers and 2 vision modes: thermal and night vision. Thermal vision is especially cool when combined with the power of the Xbox. Vibrant shades of red and yellow combine onscreen, each hue indicating the heat emitted from each object and person. Night vision is the more traditional green-tinted look we’ve seen inTom Clancy’s Splinter Cell and Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon (Mr. Clancy likes his night-vision goggles, doesn’t he?), but the dynamic shadows and lighting make the detail even more crisp and other-worldly. And, if you get tired of seeing the world through techno-goggles, you can return to normal view and enjoy the game’s incredible textures, lighting, and realistic motion built into each painstakingly detailed environment.
Freeze, sucker!
Another exciting innovation is the use of voice recognition to issue squad commands. Instead of using the quick order interface, you can issue orders verbally and your team will instantly respond. If you’ve ever wanted to be a drill sergeant like R. Lee Ermey, or if you just enjoy shouting at men with guns, here’s your chance. Now you don’t have to take your finger off the trigger (or any other key buttons) just to tell your team to bust in a door. Keep your crosshairs trained on the door and bark out an “Open and Clear” command—then get ready to deliver some steel-jacketed calling cards to any tangos on the other side.
Voice recognition requires the use of an Xbox LiveCommunicator headset, but that’s just fine because you’ll probably be playing Rainbow Six 3 online anyway. The full range of Xbox Live game modes and maps have yet to be revealed, but we do know that there will be specific multiplayer maps and modes, and that you’ll be able to play through the game’s entire single-player mode with up to three other people.
Who’s turn to go in first?
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six 3 has a long tradition of excellence to measure up to, and it succeeds on every level. It has the pulse-pounding action and intrigue of a Clancy novel, the intense squad-based tactics of its PC predecessors, and the phenomenal graphics of previous UbiSoft/Clancy console collaborations like Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell. Make your presence felt and your voice heard in the arena of global counter-terrorism. Check out Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six 3.
