Are Ubisoft deliberately trying to make the world's longest game title? Well, OK, that's a pretty minor quibble to throw the way of what is a nice little upgrade package to one of last year's better Xbox FPS titles. I'm still not budging on my insistence that having a lead character called "Ding" in a videogame is a mis-step, though. However, I digress...
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3: Black Arrow (try saying that ten times fast without blacking out) is the followup to last year's Rainbow Six 3, and, if you've played and enjoyed that game, we can offer this simple and short review -- you'll probably like Black Arrow. It doesn't attempt anything radically new, doesn't fix anything, or break anything for that matter, and at the asking price is a pretty good buy, especially if you're Xbox Live enabled.
For those of you who've stuck around (presumably the gamers who didn't play the first one, or those who did but want more detail), Black Arrow puts you in the combat-blackened boots of Domingo "Ding" Chavez (I did say it was a silly name) and his crew of three anti-terrorism experts who form the Rainbow team. The crew allocation sounds like a bad joke -- you've got a Frenchman, an Englishman and a German -- all they really need is a talking dog and you'd be really getting somewhere. Ahem.
Rainbow Team's job is to silently infiltrate terrorist encampments, kill all who oppose them and make it out alive again at the end. Well, actually, as you control Ding, you've only got to watch out for your own scalp, as when Ding's bell is rung, it's game over. Having said that, Black Arrow, like its predecessor, is a highly tactical game, and if you let your team get killed, you'll find success higly elusive. Like its predecessor, controlling your team is done either via the Xbox Live headset (if you've got one) or by using the directional pad -- in our experience, you're less likely to give the wrong order with the more specific pad, but conversely there's nothing that immerses you in the experience more than talking to your teammates.
On the single player side, Black Arrow consists of 10 missions of essentially the same quality as those found in the first Xbox title; you'll stealthily wander around, killing terrorists, defusing bombs and rescuing hostages while trying to keep you and your team around. Like its predecessor, it's also Xbox Live compatible, and arguably, that's the bigger draw for this title -- if you've played out what Rainbow Six 3 has to offer online, then the tasty treats that Black Arrow offers are likely to be irresistable. Aside from the online modes offered in the first game (and some of the same maps) there's also two new game modes -- Total Conquest and Retrieval. Retrieval's basically a capture the flag variant -- with only one flag -- while Total Conquest takes a page out of the Battlefield 1942 (and, consequently, Star Wars: Battlefront) book, charging you with taking control of three satellite stations around the game's map. As with many tactical online games, how much you'll enjoy it will depend on those you play with -- a good team is about as good as it gets, whereas a stupid team (and sadly, there are still far too many of those around) is about as frustrating experience as you're likely to find.
While the new maps have obviously been created fresh, it's almost immediately clear that there's little visual difference between Black Arrow as a whole and the original Rainbow Six 3. That's not a bad thing, per se, but if the first game's dark realism bugged you, it'll still do so now. Likewise the ingame audio is essentially identical, giving the game much more of a "mission pack" feel than a full game -- although you don't need Rainbow Six 3 to play Black Arrow.
Black Arrow is a solid single and multiplayer experience that should be particularly appealing to fans of the previous title; if you're a veteran you're probably already playing this, in fact.
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31/07/2005, 02:17 PM
The Best Game EVER!!!!
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