Product Description

Rainbow Six: Raven Shield is the sequel to Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear. The Rainbow Six franchise is known for its action-packed gameplay and heart-stopping realism and Rainbow Six: Raven Shield features a brand new Tom Clancy story line in which Team RAINBOW is led all over the world in a string of dramatic operations. The game will utilise graphics technology provided by the next-generation Unreal engine to power 15 new single-player missions that include the discovery of a cache of biological weapons and stopping an armed gang from terrorising a London bank.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17185 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: UBI Soft
• Released on: 2003-03-21
• Platforms: Windows NT, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows XP

Amazon.co.uk Review
In Tom Clancy's Raven Shield, the third game in the Rainbow Six franchise, the men and women of Rainbow return to thwart the plans of an evil madman out to recover hidden Nazi loot. This barebones plot is merely a tool to link the objective-based missions that are the meat and potatoes of the game.

A standard mission will start you off with a situational briefing and overview of your objectives. After the briefing you'll pick your team of up to eight operatives in as many as three different fire teams, and then outfit them with a wide variety of realistic weaponry. You can choose to map out a mission plan for you and your AI-driven team mates, or you can just drop into the mission and figure things out on the fly.

Raven Shield allows for cooperative and competitive online play, but unfortunately there's no mechanism that allows you to play cooperatively with friends through missions in a linear order with the storyline intact. This missing feature aside, cooperative play is still a great feature, and a refreshing break from standard death match play.

There are several significant improvements in Raven Shield, most notably the use of the Unreal graphics engine. It's vastly superior to previous games and provides crisp, clean graphics that are beautiful enough to help suspend disbelief--a feat that's typically more difficult for games with modern settings. New controls in Raven Shield such as incremental door-opening and fluid movement controls allow for much stealthier (and thus more fun) movement around the map.

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Raven Shield should appeal to anyone who favours realism in games and is tired of fast-paced but mind-numbing first person shooters. --Jon Grover

Customer Reviews

Tom Clancy's Raven Shield
As an FPSer who prefers to just shoot stuff I was a little worried that Raven Shield would give me a load of complex planning screens to fumble through and find I make a complete mess of every mission getting shot from who knows where. I had no reason to be worried as Raven Shield requires the same amount of planning as a Counter-Strike session if thats what you want.

The 'campaign' games story is told mainly by the mission briefings from various sources between each mission and the odd 'between mission' cut scene, while its not very involving it does give you the chance to skip all the reading and planning and go in and shoot everything. The story isn't exactly ground breaking anyway and the involvement I felt even though I read all the briefings and watched the scenes was pretty much zilch. The story felt more like an excuse to shoot stuff then a major part, which in an FPS is pretty much the norm. It is the rest of the game in which Raven Shield makes itself stand out.

Your squad mates are usually useless in FPSes, not so in Raven Shield, you can order them to open doors, throw grenades, charge rooms, cover you, and change how they behave (so that they follow your style, creeping around with silencers, firing at everything that moves, rushing around shooting before your noticed) and they are far from stupid.

Being someone who likes to creep around I often found my team mates saving my butt, as while paying attention to whats infront an enemy walks around behind me. Your own squad will tell you whats going on with a few simple phrases, with the other 2 friendly squads co-ordinating with you on a few occasions (based on your go codes).

The terrorists are reasonably smart, and if outnumbered they will often run away and wait for you to come up the stairs or around the corner and even throw a sneaky grenade through the door. The only problem with the terrorists is that their aim and senses seem superhuman, they almost always take you out on the higher difficulty options, and are quite hard even on the rookie option. The time old bug of sensing you through doors and walls is also here on occasion, though they won't fire through (unless they see you duck behind them).

The weapons sound fantastic, you can even hear each individual casing hitting the ground, other then the door creaks being quite generic the atmosphere generated is superb, I have physically jumped so many times when a terrorist has unexpectedly spotted me. Along with the sound the graphics are amazing, the terrorists look very life like and your squad mates animations are convincing and fluid. When it snows and you can hear the wind howling it is one of the most atmospheric FPSes out there. (Shame about the static vehicle graphics, a little more time should have been taken with them)

In multiplayer Raven Shield can be quite a different game, with many preferring not to do the sneak tactic, and take a more bold approach. Its often harder then the single player and you have to be wary of the various gadgets & tools, and quite often grenades (which are under used by terrorists in single player). Co-operatively Raven Shield is still superb, you can control a squad each with AI taking the back up positions, some very impressive hostage rescues can be pulled off with coordinated attacks!

Overall, well worth adding to your collection and a game that because of the accurate physics, excellent multiplayer, realistic AI and authentic weapons you won't tire of for a long long time.

A Touch of Class
I was not a big fan of the previous Rainbow Six games, as their substandard graphics and sound, combined with annoying planning stages did not appeal to me. However, through the addition of Unreal Technology and a vast arsenal, this new addition in the series is a top notch game.

Although the difficulty level is extreme to say the least, this just adds to the tension and makes you plan each mission down to a T, being careful to select the right weapons and equipment to go with the right Team members, even though it's practically guaranteed that 90 percent of them will be dead by the time you get halfway through the campaign. The ragdoll physics also greatly add to the gameplay, as it is always that bit more satisfying to take out a terrorist, especially with one of the high powered sniper rifles.

However, one aspect that does slightly irritate me is each terrorist's ability to see and shoot your teammates dead in a split second, from fifty metres away...with a pistol. I mean I know they're supposed to be well trained, but come off it! It's the Operation Flashpoint, 'every enemy soldier is a sniper', syndrome all over again.

But anyway, this is thee only gripe I have with what is otherwise a sublime gaming experience. It combines superb graphics, an awesome physics engine and edge of the seat tension to produce a truly immersive game. Oh yeah, and the weapon effects will tear you a new eardrum.

A game worth buying.
As successful as Rainbow Six was in establishing the genre of serious tactical squad games, it's somewhat surprising that Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield is the first new game in the series since 1999. Certainly, there've been many expansion packs for Rainbow Six and Rogue Spear over the years, and Red Storm was also busy with Ghost Recon, which takes the Rainbow Six formula for tactical realism outdoors. In any case, it's immediately clear that Raven Shield has benefited from the interlude, as the new game takes a huge graphical leap forward and packs in more realism than ever.

As in previous games, you command an elite multinational special operations unit that responds to crises in a wide variety of locations. Things start out with ordinary-seeming missions against terrorists that have taken over a refinery in Venezuela and then a group that takes some IMF officials hostage in Switzerland. But there's a larger plot that's revealed over the course of 15 single-player missions.

There's a campaign mode that tracks the careers of the operatives in your unit, which means they can get bonuses in various skill areas for successful missions or can be put permanently out of commission if they fall in the line of duty. Generic recruits will appear to replace fallen named characters, but it's in your interest to keep the best commandos alive for later missions. There's also a custom mission mode, which allows you to play the campaign missions you've successfully completed or play the multiplayer maps filled with AI terrorists. The custom missions can be played just as in the campaign, in a lone wolf mode that just requires you to go it alone and reach an extraction point, in a terrorist hunt mode that lets you take a team to wipe out a custom number of enemies, and in a hostage-rescue mode that has you take a team to find and recover civilians.

It's when you get into the actual missions that Raven Shield's differences from previous games become most apparent. The visual improvement is impressive and the environments and character models are quite detailed.

Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield packs in a lot of realism, including a big arsenal of weapons, and the close-quarters combat is a rush, since you never know if terrorists might be lurking unseen. And while the series has never been known for its visuals, this time the graphics are competitive with the best-looking first-person shooters.