Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3: Black Arrow Review for Xbox at Gaming Target

Written by Nick Doukas on August 18, 2004

Full Review: Tango is down...again.

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3 has been a smash hit among Xbox gamers since its release, and hours upon hours were spent on the online portion. Hot on its heels comes Black Arrow, a new game, but really more of an expansion pack. It corrects some of the first title's inherent flaws, and adds some rich new gameplay modes, new maps, and some new weapons.

For those of you that are new to the series, please check out our Rainbow Six 3 review -- found here -- for some background on the story and characters. For those of you that have played the original to death, let's move right along.

Rainbow Six 3: Black Arrow, once again puts you into Ding Chavez's shoes as the leader of Team Rainbow, an international commando squad made up of the best of the best. As before, you have full control of your AI squad, and can issue orders to them on the fly. This works by using contextual button commands, or you can fully immerse yourself and bark orders to your boys over the Live headset. You can advise your team to hold position, stand down, breach and clear rooms, and all sorts of other fun, military type stuff.

BA features 10 new single player missions, set in exotic locales like the streets of Milan, as well as a nuclear reactor and a middle-eastern bazaar. Going into battle with your squad, you'll have the choice of using all manner of real world weaponry, including assault rifles, sub machine guns, pistols, grenades (frag, flashbang, and smoke) as well as breaching charges and other remote mines. The .50 caliber from the first game has been replaced with 2 new sniper rifles, and many players will breath a sigh of relief at this news, since the .50 cal was considered unbalanced and overpowered in R63 multiplayer.

And that's where the real appeal of the series lies: the multiplayer. The single player campaign is excellent, and well worth your time, but once you jump online, that's where the real fun begins. There are loads of new multiplayer maps, as well as 4 holdovers from R63. Some of these have been slightly altered to accommodate the new game modes, and vets may be disoriented at first when they find a wall where a door used to be. As before, you can play through the single player missions with 3 friends over Live, and the cooperative gametypes are still lots of fun. The popular Team Survival, and Sharpshooter (essentially a deathmatch mode) return here, as well as two fantastic new gametypes Ц Retrieval and Total Conquest. Retrieval is basically capture the flag, but has you attempting to return a biohazard canister to the start point. Total Conquest is a domination type of game, where your team must capture and hold satellites spread out over the map. Once you've captured them, you must hold them for a specified length of time in order to get the win.

Black Arrow makes excellent use of the new Live 3.0 features, allowing you to build your own squad. You can recruit players, set up matches, and assign clan tags to all of your guys, which show in front of each player's name. You can also send and receive voice and text messages. Overall the multiplayer component is once again, simply amazing. The development team has tightened up the aiming, as well as removing certain glitches that plagued the first title. With the inclusion of the 3.0 features, this is the most completely featured multiplayer game yet seen for Xbox Live.а

Graphically, R63: BA looks wonderful. The maps are nicely laid out, and all of the textures, as well as weapon and smoke effects, look great. Character models once again look nicely detailed, and all of the animations (including that great rag-doll effect that drops enemies like sacks of potatoes) return here. The 5.1 surround sound is nicely implemented, and all of the weapons fire and explosions create an aural experience that's damn near perfect. Once again, a hit out of the park for UbiSoft. A few cool new musical themes are evident here, but they're pretty sparse, which is fine. All the better to hear those massive grenade explosions.