Rainbow Six

Rainbow Six. Hardly a name that strikes fear into your heart, is it? The SAS. Delta Force. Spetsnaz. These are altogether more macho names, while Rainbow Six has rather unfortunate Zippy and Bungle connotations about it. Then again, maybe that's just what the elite unit's creators had in mind. While evil terrorists are still chortling at the name, a bunch of heavily-armed men in flak jackets burst into their headquarters and kill them all.

Rainbow Six, the game, is a conversion of a well-received PC game. Surprisingly (considering how lame the PlayStation port of the game turned out to be) it's very close to the original, keeping all the in-depth tactical gameplay and even making a fairly decent shot at reproducing its multiplayer capabilities.

Over The Rainbow

In Rainbow Six, the newly-created multinational elite force is called in to deal with a series of dangerous situations. Although they seem unconnected at first, it doesn't take long before a sinister plot starts to emerge, one that is quite literally apocalyptic. The only people who can prevent global catastrophe are the members of Rainbow Six itself.

Rainbow Six differs from other first-person games in that you are in charge of a team rather than just one person. There are four members in your group, and before the mission starts you can assign each of them to any of four different teams – Red, Blue, Green and Gold. Each team can then be given a route to follow through the mission on the Planning screen. You can have four teams with one member each if you want to cover a lot of ground quickly, but it's much safer to have two men on each team so that one can give the other cover. It's possible to switch between the four team members at will during the game, but doing so cancels their pre-programmed plan of action, so if you switch characters again you have to make sure you don't leave someone stranded out in the open.

Go Go Go!

Although you can play Rainbow Six in a Goldeneye style on the lower difficulty levels, charging around the map and blasting away with a machine gun at everyone in sight, if you try this tactic on the higher difficulty levels then you'll soon end up with your brains dribbling out of the back of your skull. There are times when blitz tactics are appropriate, such as when bursting into a room to catch the bad guys by surprise, but most of the time a more stealthy approach is essential.

This need for caution is what makes Rainbow Six different to other first-person shooters, and also makes it a surprisingly tense experience. It's one of the few games that's ever managed to make me jump when something unexpected happened (the others being Rescue On Fractalus, Aliens vs Predator and Resident Evil 2, if you were wondering), and it shows just how involving Rainbow Six really is. One second you're moving confidently down a corridor, the next a previously unseen terrorist leaps from his hiding place and shoots you in the face, giving you a shock and a suddenly increased sense of self-preservation. If a game can be this nerve-wracking, imagine what the real thing must be like. Hostage rescue teams probably wear those baggy combat trousers so they've got extra room to fill them.

The enemies are smarter than in any other N64 game to date. Guards patrol set routes, but if they hear any unusual noises or notice something amiss (like an open door or a corpse) they'll either investigate or raise the alarm, depending how brave/stupid they are. If they feel uneasy they'll peek cautiously around corners rather than just walking out into the open, and they have no compunctions about using any available cover to protect themselves while they snipe at your team. On one mission, a member of Rainbow Six was actually blown away by a terrorist who spotted and shot him through a gap in a set of library bookshelves!

Blown Away

However, despite their boosted brainpower the AI characters sometimes display all the smarts of jellyfish with Alzheimer's. CPU-controlled team members occasionally get stuck on scenery and end up just running on the spot until someone shoots them, and despite the manual's claims that you can instruct computer-controlled characters to carry out special actions like throwing grenades, we couldn't get them to co-operate. Although you can still get around this by using the go-code commands to get other team members to wait at set points while you perform special actions yourself, it would have added a great deal to the tactical sections.

The enemies aren't always as bright as they appear, either. Usually they respond to noise, but one bored guard lurking round a corner once had two clips of ammo emptied into the stone wall giving him cover and didn't so much as raise an eyebrow. At other times, they have the senses of Superman (and not the N64 game version), spotting you through thick vegetation at night from a hundred yards away and killing you with a single shot!

Tango Down

Rainbow Six is reasonable on the visual side of things; the various characters in the game are well animated and the levels are large without too much fogging, but some of the textures are very blurry and there are some sections without much detail. Colours are fairly muddy as well – maybe it's meant to be realistic, but it's not very interesting to look at.

The sound is a big plus, though. On the main menu screens you get some rousing military stuff that could have come straight from The Rock, and during the game proper there's a mixture of moody background music, ambient noise from the surroundings (ranging from the chirps and gurgles of jungle fauna to the rumble of air conditioning, and even some jolly tunes when you find a radio that somebody's left switched on) and some very believable sound effects. All the weapons sound different when fired, team members report kills over their throat mikes ("Threat neutralised" and other such euphemisms) and you can even hear metal equipment jingling and clinking if you move too fast, reminding you that your enemies have ears too. Rainbow Six's audio boosts the atmosphere enormously.

Six Of The Best

Because it's a fairly faithful conversion of the PC game, Rainbow Six is one of the few N64 games that's definitely aimed at an older audience. Some people will find the need for stealth and tactical planning boring, to which we can only say, sod off back to yer Pokémon then. Devising a perfect mission plan and listening to your team-mates report a steady stream of terrorist terminations as you gradually rescue the hostages is a very rewarding feeling. On the downside, only having 12 missions is a bit on the weedy side, because they're not all that hard to beat on the simplest difficulty level. Obviously the higher levels are tougher, but you've already seen the maps by then. But these are minor complaints. Rainbow Six is an excellent game that requires you to out-think as well as out-shoot your enemies, and at a time when N64 games seem to be getting dumber by the day, it's a welcome change.

Rainbow Six has gone from being an extremely successful novel by Tom Clancy, to a successful PC game...to a major video game franchise spanning multiple systems. Last month we took a look at the N64 version, developed by Saffire...and now this (along with both the GBC and Dreamcast games that we have shots of elsewhere this issue).

Developed by U.K.-based developer Rebellion (see sidebar) the PlayStation game takes something of a different track from its brethren. While the N64 and Dreamcast versions do an admirable job of capturing the spirit of the PC game, this is far more focused on the 3D action elements.

For those of you who don't have the full skinny on what Rainbow Six is about, here's a very brief update. It's based on Tom Clancy's novel of the same name and it deals with an international task force that is used to counter terrorist threats around the world. In the PC game you were the commanding officer in charge of planning anti-terrorist campaigns, before jumping in and working with a squad of operatives as they worked through the mission itself. It was a very tactical game with a lot of emphasis on reading through intelligence reports, planning meticulously what your teams would be doing before sneaking in and killing all the bad guys. The PC game saw a lot of strategy, and also incorporated a decent-sized chunk of multiplayer gaming where you and your buddies could go in and work cooperatively.

The PlayStation version is a bit different though. The intelligence reports are still there--but you don't really have to specifically plan what any of your teams are doing. The whole thing has been dummied down to the point where the main focus is the action. A major disappointment is the complete lack of any multiplayer features. Although still a few months from completion, publisher Red Storm informs us that multiplayer won't be supported in any form...so a major part of the original experience isn't conveyed. Apparently Rebellion is reluctant to include it if it can't be pulled off with sufficient quality. An admirable attitude, but disappointing.

As PlayStation games go though, it's an ambitious project. Graphically it provides a 3D environment that's unlike pretty much anything else out there (with the possible exception of Gameworks' forthcoming Medal of Honor). All of the weapons and gadgets have made the port across, and it's also interesting to note that this is one of the increasing number of games that will make use of both sticks on the Dual Shock controller--one for moving and the other providing a PC-style "look" feature.

When the PC version of Rainbow Six was released last year, pretty much everyone went completely ga-ga over it. In a time when Quake II was ruling the roost, here was a game that used a completely new 3D engine, was based on a book (a book ferchrissakes!!!) by Tom Clancy, was from a relatively new publisher and mixed action elements with some pretty beefy strategy. Before it was finished a lot of people thought it was a little over-ambitious, but once it was released it helped establish a new sub-genre of action game. Who knows what you'd call it, but it's kind of a tactical/strategy/action thing. Sure, it had some problems...like an Al system that forced some of the NPCs (non-player characters) to act a bit odd, and it had some weird multiplayer quirks--but at its heart it was a good, solid game. The kind of thing you only normally get on the PC, and the kind of thing that console gamers look at and say, "I wish we had something like that."

Well, lookee here...Red Storm has recognized this, and has commissioned a host of console versions. There's to be a Dreamcast version when the system launches, a PlayStation version that's a completely reworked game by Aliens vs. Predator developers Rebellion in the U.K., a Game Boy game (the inspiration for which you have to find surprising!)...and then this, the N64 game which we should see in stores in time for Christmas.

Based on Clancy's most recent jack Ryan novel, the game puts you in the position of the commanding officer of Rainbow Six--a multi-nationally funded anti-terrorist organization that has to quickly curb any nastiness with the minimum amount of fuss. As CO, your job means that you have to be in complete control of every aspect of each mission...and that's what sets Rainbow Six apart from all other 3D action games.

When you start a new campaign, which will take you through 12 individual missions, you'll be faced with a large amount of information to digest before you move into any actual "doing." Before doing anything you have to look through intelligence reports and briefings to find out exactly what it is you're supposed to be performing. Once armed with the facts, you have to pick a team of operatives from a list of 20 possible soldiers from around the world (each member has unique skills) and then arm them with the equipment suited for the mission in hand. Having done this, you can survey the plans of the location you're heading to, split your group up into teams and then plot points on a map indicating where you want them to go.

This whole "planning'" phase is extremely important to the success of the run in, kill everyone, rescue hostages and get out as quickly as possible thing, so you need to give everyone something important to do. The mission planner will give you the flexibility to send your guys into action via different routes and then get them to hold their position before proceeding. By assigning orders to certain tasks you can send your boys in, get them into a strategically important location and then make them wait unti everyone else is ready to proceed.

Once all of your plans are set, you step into the action element of the game where you take on the role of one of the soldiers. As the mission starts you'll see your teammates run off and carry out their orders exactly as you specified. You can choose to follow instructions to the letter--but if circumstances change you can choose to do a "lone soldier routine" and just storm in guns blazing and try to blow stuff up without getting killed.

You can't play this thing like Quake or even GoldenEye for that matter though. You Start off with 20 guys to choose from and it's in your best interest to make sure they don't get capped in the first couple of missions. The team members are effectively your "lives"--if you get killed you take on the role of another soldier--but once everyone's dead you no longer have any men with specific skills to send into battle. Each character has his own personality traits, and as you work through the game you actually find that you can rely on certain guys to get the job done. The idea is that if a character gets cut down midway through the game, you have some kind of emotional attachment. In practice it doesn't quite work like that, but if you have a particularly experienced guy who's fast and accurate, it is really annoying when you don't have him to rely on anymore. It certainly makes things more fun than the usual cannon fodder you find in most action games. Unfortunately, the version we had for this preview didn't have the Al system properly implemented, so we can't comment on whether the soldiers act as dumb as their PC counterparts. Let's hope nouask a PC gamer about Rainbow Six and they'll recount frustrated stories of soldiers not being able to walk through doorways.

Technically this is certainly an impressive achievement for the N64 though. While you wouldn't necessarily expect some of the gameplay elements to be suited to joypad play, it's surprising what a good job the guys at Saffire have done to take it away from a mouse-based environment. On a purely cosmetic level it has to be said that the graphics engine is very impressive. With a 4-Meg pak slapped into the machine the 3D engine produces some amazing results. Running around inside the British Houses of Parliament and up the clock tower of Big Ben is particularly impressive with some beautifully drawn textures. It all runs very smoothly too and doesn't resort to excessive fogging in the more expansive levels.

While the PC version offered a comprehensive online multiplayer experience, the N64 version offers something that has to be applauded...a two-player co-operative mode. Sure it has your usual deathmatch play (although only for two players) but the co-op stuff is what could help make this a game people can really dig. Sneaking into an enemy base camp with a buddy can be quite an exciting experience--as long as you don't get pissed off and just start shooting at each other with heavy pieces of artillery.