Notebook Critic

Rainbow Six, long heralded as the king of ‘think and shoot’ action games (heck it invented the genre) gets closer to perfection with each successive generation. The latest title to take place in Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six world is Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield.

Perhaps the Rainbow Saga’s greatest asset is Tom Clancy’s uncanny ability to devise fictional narratives that closely resemble real world events, and in some cases prophesize them with eerie accuracy. Clancy’s Rainbow Six universe is one that is only slightly more unstable and volatile than ours. In this fictional world complex political problems often require a solution that is both surgically precise and lethal.

That is where you come in. You get to assume the role of the returning cast of characters that has appeared in all the Rainbow Saga games. A bit more experienced now, you and your elite team must race to uncover and defeat a Terrorist plot to destroy the world we know. Of course, this means you get to travel around the world in various locations from stark oil fields to glamorous Rio de Janeiro.

Raven Shield arrives on the Mac this holiday season in all its singleplayer and multiplayer glory after a relatively short (for Mac conversions) delay. Aspyr is handling the conversion so we can expect a quality product.

IMG was recently granted an opportunity to play a very mature build of the game, but before we get to our impressions perhaps we should set the stage a bit.

The beauty of Rainbow Saga games, for those of you unfortunate enough not to have tried them yet, is that you can play through using well-calculated tactics or let the computer plan your missions for you and jump right into the action.

When Rainbow Six first arrived there were many people like myself whose short attention spans and desire for immediate gratification turned them off. But with each generation, the Rainbow Six franchise has become more accommodating and accessible. Raven Shield seems to have found an almost perfect balance.

Levels start with a mission briefing. Initial missions begin with detailed briefings that all but spell out how to complete the level. As you progress, the amount and detail of intelligence provided before the mission starts will become reduced. Therein lies the challenge.

After each mission briefing, players are brought to the mission planning screens. You can chose to load the mission defaults and jump right into the action, or you can plan your mission.

If you chose the latter, you will get to select the members of your team for the particular mission and their kit. Gun nuts will love the veritable smorgasbord of lethal killing tools at their disposal. When equipping your squad you have fifty-seven guns to select from. Counter Strike has nothing on this.

Characters within the game have areas of specialty. As you complete missions their skills improve and they become more valuable to you. Your teammates in the game are not throwaway generic non-player characters (NPC). It is important to manage risk effectively and watch their backs. You don’t want to start later missions with an inexperienced team. An experienced demolition expert or sniper might come in handy later.

Adding to this tantalizing mix is the multi-player component. Raven Shield offers a great online experience and active community. Unfortunately, Mac versus PC network play is not possible due to Microsoft’s proprietary network gaming technology. But you will be able to play with, and against, other Mac users. Players can chose between adversarial or cooperative play. You will be able to hook-up with buddies and make new pals through Gameranger.

Whether you jump right in, or thoroughly plan each mission, the magic starts as soon as you click the ‘begin mission’ button.

Raven Shield offers a superb control scheme for Mac users. I expected the lack of a three-button scroll mouse to pose problems, but the control scheme has been well thought out. If you lack a three-button mouse, you won’t miss having one while playing this game. It might change before release, but I really liked the control scheme as it was.

My favorite feature while playing this game was the action button that is mapped to the space bar. Point at an object, or even an area on the map, and a white icon appears on the screen. The icons represent a number of possible action instructions that you can give your squad.

Point at a door for example and press space. Your squad will open the door and secure the other side.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in a squad based tactical shooter is very important. It seems as though the level of AI in games has advanced at roughly the same pace as computer hardware the past few years. It is getting really quite good.

I found that in Raven Shield when a mission fails, it is usually because of the leader. I did not find myself cursing a NPC character once. This is especially promising, as the game is not finished yet (my build was from October). This means that it could still get even better.

Raven Shield offers players a relatively smart squad. Often, while sneaking about in the shadows, I would overlook a bad guy and leave myself prone. More than a few times my squad mates shot the bad guy before he could get me. Nice.

The NPC squad mates’ abilities extend beyond simply providing back up, however. As mentioned earlier, by using the elegant control interface you can have your squad mates competently clear rooms and areas. In the past, I encountered computer-controlled squad-mates that would get stuck in the door only to be mowed down by the bad guys - not so in Raven Shield.

If you are careful in how you deploy them, I found that you could confidently send them in to do the dirty work while backing them up from a safe distance. Yes, I am a coward. That is why I write articles about war games and leave reality to the professionals.

Ultimately, when a mission fails it is usually as a result of being too aggressive yourself or in the commands you issue to your squad. A balanced approach yields very satisfying results. Having played these games for a few years, I can really see the improvements.

Enemy AI is pretty good too. I am not sure that it is significantly better than the AI in Ghost Recon - Raven Shield’s predecessor. I suppose that if the AI was too realistic that it might make the game too difficult for a ‘cream-puff’ video game player that has never seen active duty like myself. When you come face to face with a bad guy, you have a very brief period of surprise. You have to shoot quickly.

Enemies, when alerted to your presence, will often find secure hiding spots where they can get their back to a wall and face the direction they expect you to come from. These situations can be challenging depending on the environment. In other instances they will come looking for you. If you run around Raven Shield shooting wildly at everything you will end up dead rather fast.

You will know when you have been spotted, the bad guys will smash glass and start firing or call for back up. Given the ’sneaking around in the dark’ nature of the game, being spotted is usually good for a nice jump-right-off-your-chair scare. Overall the AI present in the build we got to play is very convincing and challenging to play against.

One of the major updates to this series is the switch to using the Unreal Engine by Epic. This immediately gives Raven Shield a degree of polish and refinement seen in very few games this past year. The screen shots do not do this game justice; you have to see it in motion to truly appreciate how good it looks. The atmosphere is fantastic.

High-resolution textures and lots of polygons combine to deliver one of the better-looking games on the Mac. I don’t think anyone will complain about the graphics in this game.

Thankfully, the story takes place across the globe. This provides us with good variety in level design and a broad color palette. The settings for your covert operations are never boring or dull looking.

This degree of eye candy comes at a price of course; you will need powerful hardware to run the game with all the eye candy turned on. I am reluctant to say too much about game performance on the unreleased code, but performance is comparable to other high profile first person shooters released recently on the Mac. I am not sure if the recent tweaks to the Mac version of the Unreal engine were in the build that I played.

The nature of this game, it being less of a run around the map twitch-festival, means that a lower frame rate will not adversely affect the experience as it might in a pure action game. On my machine (PowerMac G4 1.25GHz, 1GB DDR and RADEON 9000) I found the experience roughly equal to playing a bot-match in Unreal Tournament 2003.

I think this will be a must have for any G5 owner. If you really want to show your system off, this is a great way to do so.

Raven Shield boasts terrific physics accuracy. This includes ‘rag doll’ physics applied to in game characters. For example when you shoot a terrorist, they will slump over realistically. Maybe it’s kind of sick to get excited about this degree of accuracy when depicting the death of an in-game character, but it is the first time that I have seen this on the Mac.

Audio is great too. I highly recommend playing Raven Shield with headphones. Ambient sound effects are nice. Guns have a crisp metallic sound and bullets hit you with an unmistakable thump.

If you were playing the original Rainbow Six on your 604 based PowerMac, then you probably don’t need any more convincing. Your mouth has probably already started watering.

As these games have evolved through sequels, their appeal has broadened. Each generation is more accessible to a larger variety of gamers and Raven Shield aims to deliver something for every action gamer. My opinion at this stage is that it will succeed at doing this.

I liked how Raven Shield’s 15 single player levels are tied together by a typically believable Clancy story. The background of the story closely mirrors current events; the early missions involve clearing up imbroglios in exactly the sorts of places you would expect to see them.

Take the best video game engine on the Mac, add an almost legendary franchise and top it all off with challenging single and multi-player squad based tactical combat and you have a very promising upcoming Mac game.

Keep an eye out for this one - you won’t be sorry.