Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six
Reviewed by Aristotle
If I could sum up Rainbow Six for the Playstation in one
word, this is it: puzzling. The most puzzling aspect of this
game, and almost every other Tom Clancy game, is the fact
that more effort on your part goes into the planning of the
missions instead of actually executing the mission. Like,
for example, you decide EXACTLY what guns you start with,
what you're wearing, what special little doohickeys you want
to take along with you, even where you start the level at! I
don't know about you, but if I play a video game, I want to
start playing, not deciding. After I'm done deciding the
preparatory details, a good fifteen minutes have been used.
This, and two more things are the only two features of the
game that bother me.
An area of major concern for most Rainbow Six players, at
least on the Playstation, are the horrendously blocky
graphics. The walls have no texture to them at all, they
look like thin little sheets of paper, and when you're right
up against someone, their face looks to be deformed.
Terrible graphics in this game, about five out of the PSX's
thirty-two bits have been used for these graphics.
The next nasty little portion of this game are the controls.
Never have I run into a game where I had to consult the
manual on how to open doors and reload my weapon. It turns
out that you have to hit Circle and L1 to open doors, and
Square and L1 to reload. Seriously, who would have thought
that you need to press combinations of buttons to do such
basic actions and movements? Whenever I use the direction
pad to control the character, it always seems blocky and
uneven, irregular, if you will. The analog stick SHOULD, I
repeat SHOULD, feel better, but it doesn?t.
As far as the sound goes, the game has no music, which is
fine by me, considering that I always crank up my stereo
while playing. It works out perfectly like that, because the
sound effects are done so poorly that they appear a lot
louder than they should, so the music never drowns out the
sound. The sound is also very poorly done because none of it
sounds the way it should. Por ejemplo, when you fire a
single shot from a weapon it sounds absolutely nothing like
gunfire, more like a pop from a cork gun. Don't even mention automatics.
As terribly unpleasant I may have made this game seem, there
are still a redeeming quality or two. For one, the story is
pretty well-involved and detailed. I'm not going to go into
detail because that would be a spoiler, but I'll tell you
one thing: you're like a SWAT team, named Rainbow. You?re
supposed to stop terrorists from knows what unearthly
cra*. Still, I don't understand why the first couple of
levels take place inside of a house-like place.
Another revolting aspect of Rainbow Six is the AI.
Don't even mention the AI. Instead of being like, ?Help, I
need some backup?, the guards? AI is like, Must kill? must
kill??. You can tell that it's kind of easy to take out the
guards. It is easy, but the fact that your life is that of a
normal person's life (what a sin, bringing reality into a
video game!), where one shot severely injures, if not kills
you, adds cheap difficulty to the game. This brings me to
another point: difficulty. Rainbow Six is not hard at all; I
beat the first like ten levels without cheats or a
walkthrough. But as I said before, your life is the factor
that adds a touch of obscurity and hardness to the game.
Then what detracts from the difficulty is the fact that more
than one shot is rarely, if ever needed to take out a guard,
from any weapon.
All in all, Rainbow Six is basically an insult to the
Playstation. It could use a little bit of oomph (emphasis on
a little bit) to get the game to be to a tolerable level. I
recommend not having anything to do with this game at all,
unless you're a complete, out-and-out sucker for punishment.
How did I end up with the game, you may ask? I rented it
despite all the horrid reviews against it, hoping it would
be of redeeming quality, and then copied it with my CD
burner. Terrible waste of a disc, though, both my disc and
the disc the original was burned on. Plus my five bucks.
Overall: 2 out of 10
