Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear Review

Finally, a game as dull as his books!

Aboard the hijacked oil rig, I watch as my Red team scurries off to get their

fill of the Japanese killin’. I wish them luck, but I know they’re all doomed.

If you scraped all their IQs together you wouldn’t have enough points to win a

baseball game, much less exterminate the octagonally-headed scoundrels we’re up

against. I’d normally have a good laugh out of the Red team’s certain fate, but

then I look back at my Blue team; the same idiots as those on the Red team, except

these idiots are supposed to have my back once the ka-ka gets thick.

As we march down the gangway I’m tempted to turn and shoot my compatriots.

Not because they’re evil, but just to allow them some indignation in their deaths,

and grant them the possibility that if they had lived, maybe they would have

killed something.

While I finish this grim thought I’m jolted by what must surely be an enemy

bullet, since my troops seem to be even more anti-violent than Jesus. My vision

turns red for a moment as I sidestep out of the way and hide behind some boxes.

According to my health indicator, I’m half dead. Does this mean that my left

half just got completely blown off? Maybe I’m this little, legless G.I. stump

now, and none of my guys are telling me that my better half is all over their

fatigues and the deck because the macabre violence has hopelessly damaged their

fragile little minds.

Or maybe I’m just playing a stupid video game called Rainbow Six: Rogue

Spear that totally sacrifices cool gameplay and violence for “realistic”

features, yet still for some reason hangs onto colored health indicators.

Rogue Spear is something like ninety percent cool customization and

nifty little features and ten percent sloppy, slow action. I guess I’ve just

never been an accessory kinda guy, which is why I don’t click with R6:RS.

At the beginning of each mission you’re briefed by some lady who gives you

the basic scenario. This is the “story” part of the game. It usually lasts about

3 seconds for each mission. While there is eventually some tie-in between missions,

RS’s dramatic development makes a Pokemon cartoon seem like Hamlet. I

bite my thumb at thee, wimpy plot.

No lack of story would be complete without a lack of characters. While there

are dozens of agents to choose from when selecting your team, none of them bear

any significance to the game beyond their statistics (i.e. sniping ability,

explosives, stealth). So why include so many characters when they’re all exactly

the same? Well, because Rogue Spear is realistic, so when agents die,

you can’t use them anymore. Instead you’ve got to use their identical carbon

copy! Whoa, now that is some sophisticated realism.

After selecting your players you get to outfit them. Literally. Not only do

you get to equip them with what is possibly the coolest weapon selection of

any game ever (there are five different types of MP5 navy! Holy cow!), but you

actually get to dress them! To hell with all this violence stuff! Who wants

to kill when you can play G.I. Joe dress-up!?

After spending a half an hour choosing your guys and their clothes, you get

into the meatier stuff: the mission planning. At this point in the game the

shortcomings of the DC controller really start to become apparent. As opposed

to flying over the mission map and setting waypoints for your team to follow,

you’ve gotta select all number of buttons from the planning screen and then

unselect some other ones and the whole thing becomes a very tedious, insipid

process.

Finally,

after about an hour of dressing and coordinating and primping and other BS you

get to the meat of the game, the action. You’ve spent all this time setting

up a killer mission, and you’re ready to go…and the action portion of this

game turns out to be as exciting as watching golf. You can’t jump, you can’t

duck without pressing four other buttons first, almost every shot is a one shot

kill so it doesn’t matter which gun you use, and you move extremely slowly.

Coordinating your teams while in action mode is damn near impossible, since

it takes forever to issue a command, and by that time everyone has been killed.

Now, keep in mind that this would all be rectified if you had a DC keyboard

and mouse, but chances are that you don’t, in which case you should not touch

this game.

The enemy AI is astonishingly good, considering how stupid and useless your

teammates are. There’s not much room for intelligence in this game, but to their

credit the enemies do a great job of killing hostages and your teammates.

Outside of the regular campaigns, you can play practice missions and deathmatches.

The practice missions basically allow you to play any mission you’ve played

through before without affecting your saved game. While it’s nice that you can

play through any mission you’ve completed whenever you want, it’s not helpful

at all. There’s no reason to get any better at missions you’ve already beaten,

because they’re not much fun (despite the fact that you’ve already beaten them)!

Rogue Spear’s multiplayer capabilities encompass two to four players

on one mission simultaneously or your standard deathmatch. The multi-player

campaign is definitely an improvement over the single player, though the deathmatch

is nothing new.

Rogue Spear’s graphics are unimpressive with boring, featureless backgrounds

and poorly defined enemies. The animations in general are fluid, but the death

sequences (I bring them up specifically because walking and dying are about

all anybody visibly does in this game) aren’t violent enough. If I didn’t know

better I’d think the enemies were having heart attacks as opposed to being ripped

up by my hell-spewing Bullpup assault rifle.

The sound effects are also boring. The voices are clear, but the firing effects

sound awfully synthetic, and the walking samples are too plain and gritty.

This game might have been a hot item on the PC,

but it suffers greatly in the port. In every phase of the game the controls

are cumbersome and unnatural, the strategy elements are too hampered by realistic

pretexts, and the action portion of the game is too limited. Die-hard R6ers

might get a kick out of it, but I don’t recommend it to newbies unless you’re

just itchin to play dress up with some big bad army men.