by Maurice Fitzgerald

  No plan survives contact with the enemy…

With the newly enhanced AI, this age-old adage becomes very apparent when you play Rogue Spear. With more human reactions modeled, tangos run away for backup when faced with a superior force, or their determination in hunting you down, not many plans you form will go strictly by the book. This makes RS as much a tactical thinking game as it is a shooter. Now you need to truly think of all the possibilities and "what ifs" when plotting movement and actions, always knowing you may have to improvise.

Sticking very much to the normal format of the planning screens, RS comes with a couple new features, weapons and items with which you can outfit your troops. You can easily and quickly assign a uniform, body armor, weapon and other items as well as selecting ammo for each operative, or you can assign an entire kit to the whole team at once. As always the interface for assigning and outfitting your operatives is streamlined and very easy to pick up and use.

Planning Your Mission

What can I say about this part of the game that hasn’t already been said by many people before? The planning phase is almost a game in itself.

You can easily spend hours within the planning phase marking out the routes and actions your teams will take and still come up with something new each time. A nice new feature within the planning phase is a fully textured 3D map, so that you can see in full 3D the area you will be working in. This helps when you’re looking at possible ambush and sniper spots as well as choke points. Seeing it in 3D is much better than making a mental picture from a 2D plan.

Within the planning phase there are new actions for you to use and assign to your operatives and as I mentioned before, snipe and cover. Cover is an excellent function, which I’ve used extensively on some maps and not at all on others, but it’s a great asset to have and increases the survivability of your teams quite a bit.

The ability to snipe as well as sniper rifles has been one of the most requested of all things within the Rainbow series since its inception. I like these features, but I only use them when I can’t avoid it, since I’ve found sniping to be more a liability than an asset.

Sniping vs. Stealth

Think about it... when you open up with a Barrett you’re sure to take down your target, but you’re definitely going to give your cover away. Since most of the missions depend on stealth, I’ve used the sniper options only rarely. More often I have assigned a teammate to a sniper spot with his standard weapon, which you can do as well.

Assigning the cover and snipe commands is simple. Assign the spot that you want the action to take place at and assign the direction of facing for the action. Next assign a Go-Code and voila! You now have a cover element or sniper team!

Click to continue

Cover is a great order as it sets the assigned team in a cover position to mask your movement or cover your back while you take care of a task such as defusing a bomb etc. You also have the option of using predefined plans for all the maps that Redstorm has supplied for us, they all work very well but you’ll find ways to improve them once you’ve played the maps through.

Once through with the planning phase it’s off to the action phase and what impressive locations you’ll play in! From an opera house to a quiet mountain villa, there are plenty of varied, interesting and challenging environments to take on. These are the largest environments of all the Rainbow games and they’ve been beautifully detailed to bring them to life in a very believable way, beware though, Rogue Spear is much more a CPU hog than R6 or Eagle Watch was because of this.

The Eye of the Beholder

If you’ve got the horsepower this is a very beautiful game to behold as a lot of attention to detail has been placed on the locations as well as the characters in the game. You’ll see weather effects such as rain and snow, footprints left behind you in the snow that can and will give your location away to any alert tango that may happen upon them.

Other details abound. As in R6 you’ll see the chests heaving from your operatives breath as well as the vapor from his/her mouth as they exhale. Get up real close to one of your snipers and watch them and you may find yourself really thinking they’re a living, breathing person. Between the realistically modeled breathing and scanning movement you’ll be surprised to see your snipers blink as well, nice touch Redstorm!

Movement is now enhanced to allow moving while crouched as well as the great ‘peek’ feature, allowing you to peek your head around a corner and giving a smaller silhouette to your enemy. No more clumsy movement by doorways to see who is inside, it’s now as easy as poking your head in the doorway and give a quick look-see. I always hated that strafing around the door while trying to ‘cut the pie’, only to sidestep and die.

You can even take care of a little loophole while peeking around corners, this is almost a cheat but not really. If you position yourself closely to the corner you wish to peek around yet stay behind it a bit, you can peek around the corner while no part of your body shows through. This is a clipping problem and one that I’m sure will be used to great advantage by those who master it, it’s not very hard but does alter things a bit in the game. I hope Redstorm can address this in a patch.

Go to Part III