Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3

"Excellence Varies with Difficulty Level"

I learned a fundamental principle from playing Halo on all four difficulty levels: the higher you go on the difficulty scale, the dumber the Marines get. Rainbow Six 3 continues this tradition, except that it's not the Marines this time. It's your team. When you play this game at Recruit level, you have a team that can sometimes fumble around and trip over each other, but overall they have their uses for things like clearing rooms, watching your back, and killing tangos. The story is excellent in the Tom Clancy tradition: big international plots, bad guys in high places, lots of intrigue and, naturally, plenty of action. You play Domingo "Ding" Chavez, whom we first met in Clancy's novel "Clear And Present Danger." It was there that he got to know John Clark, the mysterious trouble-shooter of half a dozen or so of Clancy's other novels. As things progress in the books, Chavez not only becomes Clark's close friend, he marries Clark's daughter. By now, Clark has moved up to head an elite international team of commandos known as Rainbow, and Chavez is his obvious choice to lead the squad in the field. Ding leads a team consisting of Eddie Price from Britain, Louis Loiselle from France, and Dieter Weber from Germany. Their primary job description is hostage rescue, often dealing with seemingly impossible odds as they take on vast numbers of terrorists. In this story, the terrorists are of Venezuelan origin, and the issue is whether Venezuelan oil should be finding its way to America.

The game takes you all over the globe and puts you in settings from luxury hotels to the sewers beneath Alcatraz. The action is nonstop, and for the most part the game plays fair. On occasion you'll have a terrorist appear out of nowhere, but not very often. There's a nice diversity of weapons, including various assault rifles and machine guns, some nice RPG's and different kinds of throwable grenades. Character mobility is sorely limited; you can't climb over a chair or an end table or even some thick pallets. But within its limitations, the game delivers.

If you want a fun action game, play it at Recruit difficulty, because if you go any higher it will frustrate you to no end. First, the gun sights get absurdly variable. According to the documentation, you have a dot within a circle, and if your target is within the circle your shot will be a hit. Well, sometimes. Other times you can have the dot right on him and empty your clip into...nothing? Meanwhile, he's free to blast you to pieces while you're reloading. Second, on occasion it seems the tangos can shoot around corners. If I ever find out what kind of gun they have that can do this, I want one. Again, that doesn't happen too often, but when it does it's enough to drive you normal. Third, the number of saves you get is reduced. Most levels of Recruit give you three; Veteran gives two. I haven't tried Elite and don't intend to.

My biggest gripe with the higher difficulty level, though, is that this elite team of terrorist-killing hostage-rescuing tough guys suddenly turns into Larry, Curly and Moe. More than once I had a tango blasting away at me while one of the team was standing there watching. Does he shoot? No, he shouts "Ding, you're taking hits!" Who gave you the first clue, Sherlock????? Or a handful of bad guys might appear in the space in front of you, and one of them says "Contact!" So what does he do about it? Not a bloomin' thing. Apparently, the greater the difficulty level, the more you have to do yourself because your team is a collection of idiots.

One gripe I have with the game overall is, it doesn't keep your saves from one session to another. A save is only good until you leave the game, then you have to start the level over again. I don't think it would have been too much to keep progress points more or less permanently, the way the Splinter Cell games do. But that's a minor quibble. All in all, the game is worth the price and the effort. It's XBox 360 compatible so you can play it right alongside the Rainbow Six Vegas games, too. Pick it up and enjoy!

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 03/16/09

Game Release: Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3 (US, 11/12/03)