Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield

Greetelings there, fellow Wombatants! Michael here, and today we're looking at about another childhood favourite of mine!

Indeed, good old Raven Shield!

A 2003 (again!) first person shooter developed by Red Storm Entertainment and published by Ubisoft. (Don't be too surprised, Ubisoft wasn't always the slop production mill it's turned into, these days.)

Interestingly, while i played this a fair bit as a kid, had never finished it before now. In fact, i never got past the halfway point with this one.

And upon replaying, Amalia and i quickly found out why.

This game, even on medium difficulty, is incredibly hard, though in an unexpected way. It was challenging, but largely fair for us and the character we're playing as, but our AI squad mates kept getting absolutely annihilated!

We'll get into the AI in more detail later, but suffice it to say, we did actually wanna finish the game for this article (as well as my pride!), so we've decided to play it..... on easy difficulty.😱

Sorry, that's the way it has to be. We're just not operator enough.😉

And to be fair, even playing on easy mode, the game's still plenty difficult. Especially in the later levels, and double-especially if you're trying to keep your fellow team members alive.

(By the way, sorry, but if you wanna watch the videos in this one, you'll have to click 'em and go to YouTube. The game's not particularly gory or anything, but in keeping with the realistic theme, it often portrays violence in a grimly sober way. As such, we've age-restricted the videos)

Well, with all that said, why don't we talk about the game, starting with...

-Graphics and sound-

Awyep, just putting the technical stuff into one category now.

So, in terms of graphics, well, game's old, innit? It's from that era where there weren't enough polygons to make round objects, so you get """""round""""" objects, instead.😉

The devs did make sure to allocate some extra resources to character and weapon models, which tend to look a lot higher fidelity than some of the level design.

In keeping with the game's general theme, the developers went for a realistic look, favouring authenticity over expressive design. Of course, games that go for the "realistic" look generally age very poorly as graphics technology advances, because trying to look realistic limits how much of a visual identity the designers could give the game. It gets the setting across, but it won't drag you in, visually.

Luckily however, the sound design does some heavy lifting with this one!

First off, the themes for the main menu and mission completion screen are really, really nice. There's also a bit of ambient music in-mission sometimes, usually in the form of a nearby radio or similar. It might be my nostalgia talking, but Amalia thinks it's quite impactful music too, so there's that.😉

Speaking of impact, the gun sounds are quite pleasing, too! It's not quite the world-ending explosive report many weapons had in Devastation, but still, shotguns, sniper rifles and the like have a satisfying *thump* to them, while automatics tend to have an aggressive *clatter*.

Another interesting thing about the weapon sounds is that in many missions, your teams will need to use suppressors so as not to alert hostage takers or similar, so in those scenarios, when you hear unsuppressed weapons fire, it's extra nerve-wracking, because you know it means that one of your units is under fire.

Alongside the gunfire, both enemies and friendlies have all sorts of little tells and barks. You can hear enemies reacting to noises they hear, or shouting when they spot you, while your own team has more brevity and professionalism, with many little radio-calls of "Contact", "Threat neutralized" and the like.

It all comes together to form a game that sounds quite nice, and much of the game's atmosphere comes from the soundscape.

And i just wanna say here, while the game doesn't have that strong of a visual identity, it was pretty refreshing to play a game that keeps the vibe this sober and no-nonsense.

In our modern times of colourful anime-girls shooting each other and giggling about it, Raven Shield actually felt incredibly violent to us, simply by not having any of that. The violence isn't embellished or stylised in any way, and as a result, the game feels quite severe and serious. We know there's other games like this out there, but this game's really a prime example of those vibes.

So, with that said, let's talk about the....

-Gameplay-

So, if you know anything about the old Rainbow Six games, you're probably aware that these games essentially had 2 phases of gameplay: planning and execution.

As in, before every mission, you get voiced briefings by multiple characters, as well as the opportunity to plan your operation, including setting up 1-3 teams, selecting operative equipment, planning routes and even setting up things like door breaches with go-codes and the like. It's very cool!

You -can- totally skip all of that, just pick which weapons you'd like and maybe get an AI squad to follow you, buuuut it does make things considerably easier when you don't have to do everything by yourself. Again, this game is -very- hard.

And actually, let's get to -why- this game is so hard, actually. Let's talk about the in-mission gameplay.

So, i personally remember this game as a more close-quarters wcombat oriented Arma, essentially. A very tactical, realistic shooter that does a good job simulating room-to-room fighting.

And that's..... sort of right. Though playing it again nowadays, it occurs to me that honestly, this is much closer to Counter Strike. Tactical and leaning towards realism, yes. But at the heart of it, it's got twitch-shooter gameplay, clearly designed with competitive multiplayer in mind, and with AI that essentially consists of walking aimbot machines.

We could argue about wether that's realistic or not, but the fact is, it makes you play the game extremely cautiously.

Though in truth, the real difficulty here isn't for you as the player, but for your AI squadmates. As you can see below, you have a roster of named characters. And these are persistent. Their stats level up, but when they die in-mission, they actually do stay dead.

Now, you can't actually -run out- of people, because there's always good old "Mr. Reserve", a generic back-up squadmate with no name and rubbish stats, who will always be available. But at the rate the AI get themselves killed, you'll end up with nothing but reserves left at the end of the campaign, and that's just not very satisfying.

So why is that? Well, here's the thing: The AI in this game is a mix of extremes.

On the one hand, when they're facing an enemy at short to medium range, they're absolute terminators. Laser-accurate, quick-aiming and completely lethal. At longer ranges, that drops off a bit because they insist on firing bursts on fully automatic.

Buuuut the key word here is actually "facing" the enemy.

This. This is such a common scenario in this game. An AI team member walks through a door, doesn't look around properly and gets downed.

The Rainbow AI in this game has 2 main issues:

For one, they're deaf. While enemies often give little voice tells, have audible footsteps and such, your friendly AI doesn't seem to react to any of these things. Heck, sometimes an enemy can be firing a gun from just a couple meters away, and the AI might not even react to that, unless they're looking in the right direction.

The second issue is that while they look around to -some- degree, they generally don't do it as much as they should. These guys have tunnel vision, often entering rooms without looking around properly, only for the whole squad to get mowed down by someone standing in a corner nobody bothered to check.

Y'know Door Kickers? That game is basically the planning stage of Rainbow Six, evolved into a really awesome game of it's own. And y'wanna know the most important feature that Door Kickers has that this game's planning phase doesn't? The ability to make your units look in certain directions, even strafing while moving.

Such a powerful feature, because it eliminates this entire tunnel vision issue. In Raven Shield, the AI will either look straight forward the entire time, or turn towards the next waypoint. This even means that if you place a waypoint just a couple of meters into a room, followed by a waypoint outside of the room, the AI might approach the former waypoint while already looking toward the latter, meaning they might walk into a potentially hostile environment..... -backwards-.

You can counteract this to some degree in the planning phase, by essentially micromanaging the squad during the planning phase and making them "Zig Zag" their way into rooms, but sometimes, you just have to plan entirely different routes for the AI squads to take, in order to more reliably place the enemy in front of them, where they can see and engage them with that laser accuracy.

..... or just do more stuff by yourself. Partway through the game, we kinda started thinking of the AI as support robots. Highly capable at their assigned task, but entirely unable to make decisions on their own. And when you command them accordingly, things actually get a fair bit easier.

And yeah, speaking of easier, this is why we played on easy, or "recruit" difficulty. According to the game, all it does is slow down the reaction time of the enemy AI. Mind you, it's still entirely possible to peek around a corner and get instantly vapourised, even for a human player, but it becomes less frequent on easier difficulty.

But in general, the -enemy- AI is quite interesting. They behave very differently to your team. They -do- also have a bit of tunnel vision, but unlike your units, the enemies actually tend to react to noises in the environment. They also don't act 100% predictably. Sometimes they'll stand and fight, other times they might run off when they spot you, trying to get around your flank or ambush you further along the way.

Mind you, this often just leads to them getting shot in the back as they try to run off, but still, it adds variety to your engagements.

They can even surrender! Although this isn't a SWAT game, so while a Rainbow Team will happily arrest tangos, they typically get like ~0.3 seconds to surrender or die. Heck, with how quick and lethal the action is, it even happens that someone begins to do their surrender animation a split-second before you shoot them, at which point it's too late for you to -change- your reaction and you shoot them anyway. Pretty sure we've even seen it happening with AI squadmates. But again, it's not SWAT, so there's no points deducted or anything like that.

(P.S., we love SWAT 4 to bits, and i actually really like how the prisoner-dilemma is resolved in both games. Really helps differentiate them as different games about different kinds of special units!)

That's all the "special" parts of the gameplay covered. As for the more usual shooter elements, the game's got a pretty massive selection of weapons. We counted 57 guns, along with various bits of equipment like grenades, gas masks, heartbeat sensors and various weapon attachments. Also, all of this is unlocked from the start. You get to use Rainbow's full arsenal for planning and execution right from the first mission.

The gunplay, movement and the like is fairly satisfying. Again, feels quite Counter-Strike-y, though a bit slower. It's tactical and methodical as you make your way from room to room, but can suddenly get very frantic and fast-paced upon contact with the enemy.

So, now that i've waffled on for a good while, why don't i let Amalia take over, so she can tell you about the ....

-Story-

Right, hi there! So, fun fact: We actually quite enjoy Tom Clancy novels, too!

And yes, we -have- read Rainbow Six!

No, we don't know why it says "A Jack Ryan novel" on R6. It's a John Clark story. Ryan isn't in this one.

Of course, this is the third game in the franchise, so it doesn't have the same story as the novel. The first game apparently did, but Michael only played a tiny bit of that.

So, we'll say that from this point on, a spoiler warning shall be in effect. (Please mentally insert a warning klaxon here.😉)

So, even though the game doesn't share the novel's story, there's actually still a couple of similarities between the two.

For instance, the first few missions seem largely unrelated, at first. They just seem like random incidents that the team is called in to respond to.

In the novel, this is because the bad guys actually control a major security contractor, and sponsoring increased global terrorism will increase the need for such firms, thus spreading their influence, with a certain end goal in mind.

This game does a similar thing, where story is gradually unveiled as you progress, and previous missions start to fit into the bigger picture as more things come to light.

So, here's a summary: Two high-ranking officers of the Axis-aligned Croatian military during world war 2 managed to amass some ill-gotten gains, and then escape with them at the end of the war.

One of them fled to Venezuela, while the other fled to the Cayman islands. Now, in 2003, the one who fled to Venezuela is exposed, and the government begins investigations and proceedings to deport him to Croatia to be put on trial.

This causes his former partner in crime to panic. You see, the man's assumed a new identity and, behind a mask of a wealthy, philanthropic elder, is actually planning a big campaign of terror, destabilizing markets, allowing him to rather seriously enrich himself in order to massively finance far-right movements worldwide.

Anyway, Rainbow obviously thwarts his plans, culminating in them stopping the release of a chemical weapon at a parade in Rio. (Interestingly, in the novel, Rainbow stops the bad guys from releasing an engineered virus at the Olympics. Again, some similarities!)

Honestly, we always find it interesting how Tom Clancy's works have been turned into movies, games and the like so successfully.

On the one hand, he wrote contemporary military and espionage novels with plenty of action and drama, but then, if you've read any of his novels, you'll know that Clancy was a -very- detailed writer. Each and every scene is super-well fleshed out and the stories are long and complex. As a result, Clancy's books are pretty enormous and take ages to read.

Now that's a good thing, because the quality of his writing was top-tier and his stories memorable. But it makes it kinda curious that his name is attached to so many movies and games, where the story necessarily has to be compressed and simplified in order to fit into just a few hours.

(Fun fact, the Rainbow Six novel in particular is one of the thickest books we own, and it probably took us around a couple of -months- to read through the whole thing! Highly recommend it, though. Great read.)

Anyway, enough swooning over a favourite author of ours. Let's get onto our...

-Conclusion-

It's interesting, really. Normally, when we write about one of Michael's old favourites, he tends to be nostalgic and forgiving with this views on the games, while i tend to be a bit more objective, sharing in his memories to a degree, but also looking at the games with a fresh, modern perspective.

With this game though, our views are kind of reversed, in this regard.

Michael still has the nostalgia of course, but somehow, i enjoyed this game more than he did. We figure his nostalgic feelings towards this one set his standards much higher than they should be for a 23-year-old game. He always sort of revered this game as the "ultimate tactical shooter", as it were.

I, meanwhile, was expecting an old shooter, and was pleased by the fact that it really does do a pretty good job at feeling quite realistic and tactical.

That's not to say the game is without flaws. Again, the AI is quite unreliable, sometimes acting as a lethal death-sniper, then at other times getting completely wiped out by a single bad guy with a pistol because of extreme tunnel vision.

And even on recruit difficulty, playing the later levels often felt less like a simulation and more like, well, playing a competitive shooter against the sweatiest of opponents, who take 0.1 seconds to aim and always go for headshots. Almost felt like the enemies were about to start bunnyhopping, teabagging or whipping out knives because it makes you run faster or some such.

Though in all fairness, it could be argued that the difficulty adds tension to every encounter. And that'd be true.

So overall, we did enjoy our time with Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield. It does hold up quite well, so long as you keep the game's age in mind. It'll entertain you, not necessarily wow you.

Oh, and also, in case you're wondering: We won't be doing the Athena Sword or Iron Wrath expansions.

During our gameplay, we already had a few minor technical difficulties (All related to video recording, so probably not a problem for the average player.), but for some reason, we couldn't seem to get either expansion pack to work, either with our physical copy or the steam version of the game. And frankly, playing this during a major heat-wave, we couldn't be bothered to dig through forums for solutions and what have you. The patience just wasn't there.😜

Well, with that said, we hope you had a good read! And until next time, stay safe, keep your situational awareness when embroiled in close quarers wombat and have a good one!😉