Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3

The story is basically the same as every other Rainbow Six game. The United States is in trouble and you're a Rainbow anti-terror member. You have to save hostages, escort people to safety, the usual. You're playing as Domingo "Ding" Chavez and you must lead your squad through fifteen levels fighting off terrorists who stand in your way. With all that in my head, I turned on my PS2 and watched the intro video, which by the way is very good. After seeing it, I was ready to play so I started with my missions and like a lot of other shooting games, there is the "training" level that tells you how to use the controls and what not.

After completing the first "training" mission, I finally got to actually play. The first level was actually very fun. Not a lot of terrorists, but enough for you to get the actual feel of the game. You save a couple hostages, kill a couple terrorists and there you go, mission over. Great! Soon after the first couple of missions though, the

AI seemed to get really smart. I couldn't peek around corners or sneak up on them. It's like after I crossed a certain point, they knew I was coming and started to shoot at me before I could even see them.

The game features a co-op mode so you can beat all fifteen levels with a friend. This can be a lot more fun than playing it by yourself because your friend is right next to you and you don't have to stop and worry about trying to control the AI on your team. This is really handy in going through heavy guarded areas or through rooms with two different ways to go in. I personally love to play good co-op games, but it's pretty

hard to find a good one that's fun to play with your bud.

The AI is something that bugged me quite a bit. These guys have really good aim. If I had to take a wild guess, I would say that the AI make contact 60-80% of the time they fire at you. It doesn't make the game very fun considering that can easily make a person very angry and drive them to chunk the CD and rip the

CD case, which again is bad if you, umm, rented it.

Playing the game online is probably where you will get most of your fun from. Online modes feature Sharpshooter and different types of deathmatch play. Deathmatch is probably the best one to play, but it does get rather annoying when you get trigger-happy people in there and on your team shooting away while you're trying to be stealthy and they go and give away your position.

The replay can vary. Like I said earlier, it can be really fun playing co-op with a friend, but it can royally suck when playing by yourself. If Ubisoft didn't add the co-op mode there, the replay value would probably have been one of the lowest score I would give. But I remember my first shooting game, and I just plain out sucked. But after a few months, I became a pretty good at it and have been dominating shooting games since. Rainbow Six on the other hand, was hard for me and I have a lot of experience. It took me over twenty times to beat mission 7, Old City, alone and I was getting pretty angry. But I was having a little bit of fun on other missions. The Oil Refinery, mission 3, was all right because that's about the only mission I played that made me feel like I was actually a anti-terrorist team member fighting. Most of the other missions mostly felt like a run and gun type game with less people.

The graphics on the other hand are fairly good, especially after missions and you get the little FMV about the next mission. It's awesome to just sit there and watch it because it kinda gets the adrenaline going for the next mission, for the next hostage you have to rescue, the next group of terrorists you have to go through. The terrorists seem to look fairly good in the game play which is a plus.

I like the realism in the game too. A couple shots to a terrorist will kill him, but again it's hard to get those couple shots in when they see you before you see them and you have just about the same damage rate. If they can fix that to where you can peek around a corner and they don't see you, I think that will make the game a little better game play wise.

If you have a headset for the PS2 you can use it to control your team members using over eighty voice commands. I don't have enough patience to say things three time before it actually works, so I stuck to using the remote to handle my commands. The microphone is a lot easier than the remote but if you want to get things done quickly, use the remote. You will order your teammate faster and after a while you will just know what buttons to push to order your team.