Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Lone Wolf

"Not worth the disk it's printed on"

There's a long line of Rainbow Six first-person shooters, with varying levels of success. All of them for the Playstation failed miserably, and Lone Wolf is no exception. While it does have a few notable highlights, most of the game is just miserably made, poorly thought out, or even just done in a half-assed way.

For those who have played Rainbow Six games before, this one does have some significant differences that should probably be noted right off the bat. Nearly every game in the series features squad-based play, with teams of three or more taking tactical roles in completing objectives. Usually this means one player controls several different characters, or multiple players play as a group. Lone Wolf, as the name implies, puts you up against the enemy alone. No squads, no multiplayer. This could be seen as a plus or minus, depending on your preferences.

Speaking of pluses and minuses, I'll give you a quick breakdown of the pros and cons of the game. It's hard to separate everything into categories such as ''graphics,'' ''sound,'' etc., because the gameplay is very much dependent on all of these things and on the game coming together as a whole.

First, the good side. At first glance, the graphics seem pretty good. There are some pretty cool snow effects in some levels, and the night vision goggles look damn cool. The terrorists have some fairly decent character models as well, and the guns you carry look realistic enough. Also, the controls are easy as pie. The game uses the now-standard controls for Playstation FPS, with the left analog stick controlling movement and the right looking around, with R1 shooting. It also manages to fit old-school controls into the same setup though, so R2 and L2 strafe, and the d-pad looks right and left and moves forward and backward. Since the controls are not customizable, it's a good thing they incorporated both styles into the setup at the same time. The menus are also easy to navigate. The final ''plus'' is the realism--if you get shot once or twice, you are dead. You can't carry a truckload of weapons with you. Sometimes you have to reload your gun. It helps very much with the atmosphere, and fans of tactical shooters won't be disappointed by this factor.

The bad far outweighs the good though. Those graphics that seem so good at first glance fall apart up close, as everything gets pixilated at even a moderate distance. On top of that, polygons bend with your perspective in close, and seams appear left and right on buildings, rocks, and just about everything else. You also have your night vision goggles on most of the time anyway, so if things do look good, you'll only be seeing them in shades of green anyway. If you stand next to a building, and aim your sniper scope right at it, you can see clear through to find enemies on the other side. The clipping is horrible in this game, making anything indoors or even remotely close to a building very difficult to navigate, because you get stuck on everything. This is not good in a tactical shooter, where sneaking around corners and being stealthy is important. Even the terrorists, who all have the exact same character model by the way, have trouble navigating the environment. With no interference, some enemies will get stuck on walls and other objects just walking their preset path. These guys don't need these kinds of troubles, as they need all the help they can get. Their AI is practically non-existent. You can shoot one dead, and the next guy will stroll along until you shoot him dead in the same spot, and then the next one does the same thing, until you have a pile of dead, stupid terrorists. You can literally set off a hand grenade in the same room as them, and they still won't come running. It makes you wonder why they bothered making some guns have silencers. Terrorists have to have direct visual contact with you, and I mean DIRECT, or they will never see you in a million years. Of course, once they do see you, you're dead, because they shoot unhesitatingly and never miss, ever. For some reason, no matter what part of the body you hit them in, they always grab their stomach and fall over. You can shoot them in the head, foot, groin, ass, whateverÉ they always grab their stomach and die. Usually right on top of heir friend who was just shot standing in the exact same place. The sound is very generic: One bang for guns without silencers, one for guns with silencers, one for grenades, one ''Hey you!'' for guards, some footsteps and a generic wind blowing sound for the outdoor levels. That's literally it. And while the controls are smooth, none of the weapons seem to fire right. Sometimes bullets will veer WAY off to one side, as if your character didn't set the sights right or something. Even when your crosshairs are lined up perfectly, and you wait to make sure your character is steady, the bullet sometimes misses by a couple feet. And donÕt even get me started on grenades. Sometimes they bounce once and fly straight up into the sky, never to be seen again. And to top everything off, the game is five measly missions long. You can probably finish it in 45 minutes. I have seriously seen demo disks longer than this, with less bugs.

This is one game where you seriously have to wonder where all the programming time was spent. The gameplay, graphics, levels, and everything else are all lacking in major ways. It looks like just a cash-in on the Tom Clancy name, but you would think they would have at least TRIED to make a game. There is just nothing to Lone Wolf at all, and even at the five bucks I paid for it in the bin at the local videogame shop, I feel cheated. They should be giving these things away for free, like those America Online disks.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 10/29/02, Updated 10/29/02