Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six

"You keep the dope just bring me six figures"

Rainbow Six was a number one best-selling novel by Tom Clancy, and having read all of his, I can say it's one of my favorites. The main focus of the book is an anti-terrorist group named Rainbow. They go on ultra-secret missions all over the world to take down terrorists, and end up having to deal with a very complex terrorist conspiracy. The video game follows the book very closely; most of the missions described in the game are taken directly from the missions Rainbow undertakes in the novel.

CONCEPT (8/10)
Taking down terrorists, freeing hostage, and making world safe for sex, drugs, and alcohol, that's my idea of a good time. However, Rainbow Six adds some strategy to this genre. ''Rainbow'' is the name of the anti-terror group; ''Six'' indicates that you're the commander of this elite team. The game reflects your role as commander and leader. The basic concept of this game is that not only do you do the shooting, you plan out the assault down to the most minor detail. It's actually a pretty fun concept once you get into it.

GAMEPLAY (7/10)
Here's what you do: first, you get a little recon analysis of your mission. Then you plan; this stage is vital. You can send in three team members. You must first choose your members out of the Rainbow roster. Members who take severe damage in one mission may not be at full health in the next, and if a character dies, they are gone for good, so it's wise to mix it up and let characters recover. You also equip your character with armor, equipment, and weapons appropriate to the situation, which has a huge impact on the mission's success. One particularly excellent piece of equipment is a sensor that allows you to monitor the locations of enemies by detecting their heartbeat. While the book's Rainbow troops only used this device in their last battle, you have access to it from the beginning. Finally, there are usually three points of entry, and you choose where to send your men into the level.

Once in the level, everything is simple FPS style. Usually, you go find a hostage then play the escort game we all love. You can switch between your three members in real-time; obviously, make sure that a character is safe in a dark corner before you leave him to move another guy. Sometimes, you will want to position your troops strategically for a coordinated assault on an area. All in all this feature offers some cool opportunities for strategic thinking.

In fact some levels require way too much strategy. In these cases, simple strategy will not do, and you need to figure out a special, clever ploy that is not necessarily obvious. One of these in particular left me amazingly frustrated as a spent a whole day failing and failing. I eventually had to come here to GameFAQs and check out the Walkthrough. The solution was something amazingly simple and yet very unrealistic; I had even thought about doing it, but had dismissed it as, ''No that is way too dumb for them to have put THAT in a game.'' Let me tell you, that level is one particularly bad part of the game. But most levels do offer a pleasant mix of strategy and assault.

GRAPHICS (7/10)
The initial menus are their own flavor of ugly, but once you get past that treat the game looks alright. There are the typical jags and crags that are so common in three dimensional environments on the PlayStation, but these are few and are generally excusable. The actual scenery, where these hostage-takings occur, look pretty good, and there is a lot of variety, from a penthouse apartment to an amusement park. Each of the locations basically is just what you would expect and facilitates the action as you might desire. Not a nice looking game, but it serves its purpose.

SOUND & MUSIC (6/10)
No music in this game; they want you to concentrate hard on saving those hostages. There are many not so great sound effects, but I don't criticize them too badly for this since, at the very least, they make sound a significant part of the game play: you can hear guards, and avoid them, and they can hear you, and come after you. Or, you can just turn on the stereo.

EXTRA (2/10)
Nothing to speak of; no multiplayer, which tends to be the biggest extra in FPS games. You can keep trying to beat your time records, but there is basically no replay value either. It's a pretty short game, really, and the action is not great enough to completely offset this downside.

OVERALL (7/10)
This is a pretty decent game, which was well worth the 9.99USD I shelled out for it. However, it's pretty short, so you could probably beat it in a rental, and if you're willing to put in a good amount of time over a five-day rental I'd go that route. Recently, I was thinking about this game having just reread the book, and realizing that this game was among the first in what has turned out to be a very successful group of Tom Clancy games, the most famous of these probably being Splinter Cell. While this game in itself was not especially great, it deserves some bonus consideration for its legacy in starting the Tom Clancy series.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 06/10/02, Updated 06/23/03