Rainbow Six 3

Join Domingo Chavez and his team in their quest to take down the Terrorists. Rainbow Six 3, the tactical first person shooter, finally appears on Xbox and there's fun in store for those with Xbox Live. Step inside and read all about it.

Tom Clancy's anti-terrorist team has finally made it to Xbox and it's a very welcome debut on the console.

The gameplay has been chopped down compared to the PC versions of the franchise. Gone are the multiple squads and the exhaustive pre-mission planning. However, this does not seem to detract at all from the gameplay experience – the streamlining for console users appears to make perfect sense rather than being an attempt to dumb down the title.

The player controls Domingo Chavez, who first appeared in Clancy's Clear and Present Danger before graduating to the hero of Rainbow Six. Ding is joined by three teammates – it's interesting to see these three are also characters from the R6 book. Missions follow the well-trodden path of sneak infiltration, bomb defusing, hostage rescuing and killing terrorists. The three squad members can be ordered around using joypad buttons, or more interestingly, via voice commands with the Xbox Live headset.

There are nagging problems – though they aren't major ones. The first is that although you can save three times during a single player mission these saves are memory only. So, if you don't finish the mission before you turn the Xbox off, you'll have to do the whole mission again. It just means you should only start a mission when you've the time to play it through.

Secondly, there's an issue with voice communications online. When you play multiplayer and are killed you have to sit out the round – though you can spectate and switch between teammates to watch what they're up to. This isn't a problem it's normal in this kind of game – and obviously you can't use voice communications because you'd be aiding players too much – especially with the third-person spectator free cam. However, you can play all the single player campaign missions with up to three other friends and when you die you can't use voice coms – this is annoying. When one team member died in the mission, we couldn't talk. So, in that case it was just worth suiciding and doing the map again as missions take quite a while to complete.

Rainbow Six 3 is a visually arresting game thanks mainly due to the lighting system from Splinter Cell. There are proper real-time shadows that can alert terrorists to your presence. The textures are detailed but the character models are a little simplistic. However it's just one of those games that looks great due to the care and attention put into it rather than one particular "wow" factor. The sound design is fantastic – there's even the option of hearing teammates and HQ radio messages through the Xbox Live headset.

The best fun to be had with R6-3 is the online multiplayer component through Xbox Live. There are numerous singleton and team games on offer such as the Counter Strike style Team Survivor, Sharpshooter deathmatch and even the possibility of playing single-player campaign missions with co-operative human players. Xbox Live users have yet another great game to play.

[Alex]

Rainbow Six 3 shows aptly how a complex PC franchise can be ported to a console yet retain a lot of intelligence and fantastic game design. The use of the Xbox Live headset is inspired and the online multiplayer game is sublime. UbiSoft has shown once again is the finest third party producer of Xbox software. The single player game can be a little samey after a while though and that's why the game doesn't get a score of nine.

[Jen]

My, oh my, this is a tough game. I have to admit that I struggled with it even on the easiest setting. The awkward save game feature makes the single player experience even harder. But I persevered and that should tell you a lot about how much fun Rainbow Six 3 really is. The single player campaign is a joy – even better played with friends in co-op mode, and the online modes are top notch.

[Harry]

UbiSoft continues to show that it is willing to put time and money into Xbox games. Rainbow Six 3 is a prime example of a top quality product. The innovative use of the Xbox Live headset and the many options for online and link-up play show R6-3 to be a console game of the highest order and one of the very best we've played on Xbox this year.