by Maurice Fitzgerald

  Yes, I’m nitpicking the hell out of the AI here. Why? Because it is one of the best of all time (IMO) and with continued nitpicking and input from us loyal fans the series will continue to grow and raise the bar for all shooters. The level of immersion in this game is unsurpassed in a shooter. No other shooter right now gives you the same feeling of ‘being there’ that Rogue Spear does. With the improved AI of your team and enemies I sometimes find myself needing to pinch myself to make sure I’m not dreaming.

Animations, Maps, and Stealth

The animations of your team and enemies are as before in R6, all motion captured and very nice... truly believable. From the breathing to the way your teams scan around for enemies, they seem so alive. Hostages also have a real life sense to them, you WANT to save them after seeing them crouched in the corner in fear. I love it when they get some brain matter splattered all over them from some hapless terrorist and they bail out screaming “I can’t take it anymore!”

The mission maps are all very well thought out and designed, and they’re also quite large which makes for some nice long mission times. Some are short and sweet while others are just plain huge, with lots of sniper and ambush spots for you to pay attention to. There are even a couple of stealth missions again in RS, similar yet much more challenging than the ones before it. This leads to another point about the Rainbow series that in some places has become a hot topic for debate. Are the stealth missions really needed?

Personally, I give the stealth missions a resounding YES! Yes, on all counts that is. Yes, they are challenging and yes they can be most definitely frustrating. But, yes they are a great part of the game and another element to that sets the Rainbow series apart from any other. I’ve played through the stealth missions numerous times until I got them right, and I’ve learned that patience is the key.

Some people, including a reviewer I read a while back, said that the stealth missions really had no place in the game. I disagree.

Remember that Rainbow is a completely self-contained unit and as such operates a bit outside the normal boundaries of other agencies. To do this you will not always be able to rely on intel from other sources, so you need to gather it yourself. This is where the stealth missions come in as far as the storyline of Rainbow goes and how they fit into the storylines of the plots within the games.

I’ve passed on my compliments to the designers of the missions telling them to make sure they keep those stealth missions in there. They’re extremely immersive, for me at least. There is nothing like stealthily walking down the hall and being surprised by a towel clad Russian mafia guy to get your heart stopping for a brief moment, knowing your cover is blown. Each time I do those missions I do it with the attitude that it’s really me in the game. Tt helps me to be a bit more patient because I don’t wish to be on the receiving end of someone’s boom stick.

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Another great improvement in the series has been the use of frag and flashbang grenades. The grenade damage radius has been tweaked to be more along the lines of its real life counterpart and the flashbangs will now hurt you much more if you don’t turn away from them when they go off. Watch it with those frags, they are bad news for your team if you are in their blast radius!

The one place where Rogue Spear needs some serious work out of the box is in the multiplayer aspect. I have tried numerous times to play games on the Zone (I know, I know I shouldn’t expect the Zone to be a great place to play anyway… lag city) to no avail and this is on cable modem! I expect and understand games played on services like the Zone will have some lag issues but when you have a cable host and all cable connects and your lag is on the average of 5-8 seconds there’s a serious net code problem.

With a patch this will hopefully be fixed because Rogue Spear has some of the greatest environments to play in, such as the Kosovo map where there are ambush and sniper spots galore. Over a LAN Rogue Spear just plain kicks ass and with more streamlined internet play this game will even be better to play than the original Rainbow Six was!

The game flows very well and the missions are much better designed, allowing Redstorm to show off their Sophomore skills, which cause other games to pale in comparison. For a relative newbie to the industry, Redstorm has more than proven themselves in a short period of time. I hope we see more of the Rainbow series beyond the expansion pack that is planned for Rogue Spear to be released next year.

Core Rating: 100