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GC

North America

Rainbow Six 3

by Steven Rodriguez - July 24, 2004, 8:43 am EDT

8

Shooting terrorists by yourself is good fun, but as they say, it takes two to tango.

It's the year 2007, and a terrorist organization is threatening to disrupt world peace by doing a bunch of mean and nasty things to the oil-rich country of Venezuela. The only group good enough to stop them is Team Rainbow, led by Domingo "Ding" Chavez. Go in, save some hostages, kill some tangos (terrorists), secure valuable information, then get you and your team out alive in time to save the day.

Yep, that sounds like Rainbow Six 3, another one of Tom Clancy's finest for the GameCube. The premise of the game involves team leader Ding (that's you) taking the three other members of Team Rainbow around the world to embark upon various anti-terrorist missions, ranging from hostage rescue and tango elimination, intel gathering missions, and stealth and solo missions, just to name a few. Although there are only four of you against dozens of heavily armed tangos who like to shoot first and ask questions later, the tools and tactics that you and your team have at your disposal make the job easy.

You control Ding from the first-person perspective. Although you're carrying a gun, the game doesn't play like a first-person shooter. Instead, you need to carefully round every corner, send your team to scout ahead, clear out rooms using grenades and flashbangs, and issue orders to breach one door while you storm in from the other to cover a room. Like the other R6 games, going in with guns blazing is a one-way ticket to the morgue, as you're basically playing one-shot kills the whole way through. That includes you and your teammates, so you're going to need to go up against the baddies much like you would if you were actually holding that gun in your hand, creating some major tension.

You need to make sure every location you're moving to is completely covered by looking around for enemies in all directions. If you think you've cleared out a room, and there's a tango waiting for you on a ledge above the doorway, you're a dead man if you don't turn around to check behind you as you go in. Because of the awareness you need to have of your surroundings, the pace of the game is slow for the most part. When you get into a heated fire fight, however, things get pretty intense in a hurry, with the gunplay over just as fast as it started.

Using the rest of Team Rainbow to help you cover every angle is virtually a requirement if you want to successfully complete your mission. Besides just following you around and making sure your back is safe, you can issue orders to them to help make things easier. If you see a door and are pretty sure there are tangos on the other side, you can issue an "Open, Flash, and Clear" order. They'll open the door, toss in a flashbang, then go in and clear the room. If you're going into a room that has more than one entry point, you can issue a "Zulu-Go" order, which will hold your team at one door while you go to another, allowing you to storm into a room from two angles simultaneously to confuse and overpower anyone inside.

For the most part, your team does a decent job of helping out, but sometimes the game feels like it's you alone versus the terrorists. The AI can be stupid at times. For instance, if you're walking down a long hallway and order your team to advance to the end of the hall, they won't until you move out of the way. When they open doors to throw grenades or flashbangs inside, they'll stand in the open for the terrorists to shoot at before the explosive detonates. When you're in a relatively open area and are being fired upon, instead of running for cover, they'll sit in place and take aim at the shooter while losing half their life. You also can never seem to position your team exactly where you want them, especially since you can only issue orders to them as a group of three instead of individually. Despite these annoyances, though, the majority of the time they are extremely useful to the cause, and you'll need to rely on them to cover your butt a lot if you forget to clear an area.

The game controls well for the GameCube controller, but as Rainbow Six 3 was really designed for the Xbox and PS2, the GC's lack of input buttons does hurt it a bit. The A Button is your primary action button, letting you open doors and issue advancement orders to your team, and perform other actions. The B Button tells your team to hold or regroup. The weapon change interface is smart, as you can switch between your primary and secondary weapons by tapping the L Button, or clicking it to choose among the four weapons you can hold in your inventory.

Where things get a little messy is the action interface. Because the same button is used to issue orders and do actions yourself, you might accidently order your team to move into a room that you don't want them to. For instance, if you want to open a door slowly to toss in a flashbang yourself before entering, you'll need to hold down the A button while the aiming cursor is on the door you're opening while hittting up or down on the D-Pad. If the door opens too far and the cursor is no longer aimed at it, letting go of the A Button will order your team to move to where you're looking at, usually inside of the room you want to go into, blowing your cover. It happens that Up and Down on the D-Pad also toggle your weapon zoom and crouch/stand position, respectively, which could also accidently go off if you don't quite get things right. Generally you won't have to deal with situations such as this, but it would have been nice to tackle certain rooms in just the way you wanted to.

Where the game really shines is the split-screen two-player mode. Where you would be relying on sometimes spotty AI teammates in the single player, if you have a real live human next to you, it's a lot easier to coordinate plans of attack. Since you are free to enter rooms exactly as you want to and place your teammate in the best possible place, it makes the game flow more smoothly, and it's a lot more fun to do the co-op thing with someone you know is going to hit their shots and execute in the way that you want them to. It's a real shame that this game isn't online, since you'd always have people to play with anytime you wanted, but unfortunately that feature isn't available in the GameCube version.

Rainbow Six 3 is a pretty solid shooter for the GameCube, but only truly worth the purchase if you have a friend around. While you'll get plenty of mileage out of the single player game and its 15 missions, it will feel like you're really playing the game alone instead of as an elite team. Still, it's plenty of fun to just go around and shooting up the nasty terrorists like a good soldier does, and those who like to do so will enjoy this game.

Score

Graphics Sound Control Gameplay Lastability Final
8.5 8 7 7.5 7.5 8
Graphics
8.5

A very good looking game to begin with, but the lighting and shadows those Tom Clancy games are known for add a little icing to the cake. The game isn't as smooth as it appears it should be, but this isn't the type that really needs to be. Bonus points for the flashbang effects if you're unfortunate enough to be caught looking at one explode.

Sound
8

Guns all make their own unique sounds, terrorists talk to each other, bullets fly through the air, and radio communication from teammates is helpful (though a bit repetitive). It's really nice with Dolby PLII, but Stereo works just find and dandy.

Control
7

Although you've got a gun and it's in first-person, it doesn't really feel like an FPS. It's a little slower, and the control setup given to you works well. This game is another case of lack of buttons on the controller, however, so there will be plenty of times when you wish you had another button to prevent your team from doing something you didn't want them to do due to the double functions of a few inputs.

Gameplay
7.5

The box says "Squad-Based Counter Terror," but it's more of a one-man wrecking crew. While it's really important to position your teammates to help you out in many situations, you're very limited in how they can do so. It's also frustrating that they don't duck for cover when they're being mowed down by someone they can't hit from 10 feet away. Otherwise, the rest of the game is really fun, and can get pretty cutthroat on the higher difficulties.

Lastability
7.5

Unless you have a friend who can play split-screen with you, it's pretty much a play-through-once-or-twice-and-you're-done type of game. There is an mode to set terrorists in random areas through the levels, but unless you're playing with a partner, it does get boring quickly. The multiplayer is very fun, as you can coordinate better attack plans with a human than you could have with the spotty team AI.

Final
8

Shooting up terrorists is fun, that's for sure. It's a nice game to play through if you want to get tactical shooter appetite whetted, especially when a friend is around to more realistically tackle touch situations. What this game really could have used is online play, but we all know how that end of the GameCube's functionality has turned out. It's a great rental, but only really worth buying if you have a friend handy (and don't have an Xbox).

Summary

Pros
  • Excellent two-player mode
  • Good looking game; good sounding game
  • Killing terrorists is fun
Cons
  • Control can hinder gameplay at times
  • Single player tends to get old after a bit
  • Team AI is a little stupid and somewhat limited
Review Page 2: Conclusion

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Genre Shooter
Developer Ubisoft
Players1 - 2

Worldwide Releases

na: Rainbow Six 3
Release Jun 17, 2004
PublisherUbisoft
RatingMature
eu: Rainbow Six 3
Release Jun 25, 2004
PublisherUbisoft
Rating12+

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