Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six®

Game is awesome, really sets the tone of being a special forces soldier. This version however has game breaking bugs such as npcs that don't spawn which makes certain missions a chore to complete going over and over till you can finish them.

Not working on Win10x64.

First of all, I understand that this is an old game that revolutionized the tactical shooter subgenre and deserves to be reviewed on its own terms and not by the standard of modern tactical shooters. Now that that is established, I am very disappointed with this purchase. The developer clearly has not gone back and fixed this game to make it compatible with modern computers and modern resolutions. Music is absent. The control scheme makes no sense and needs to be rebound to the traditional WASD format. There are glitches with the mouse courser. There are graphical glitches that result in being able to see through the character models' legs. Sometimes the other friendly character models didn't spawn. Sometimes the game freezes on me and I have to restart the mission. I am sure there is a fix for these problems somewhere, but this is still a commercially sold game. It needs to be playable right from the store.

Rainbow Six is not like other shooters. It is a Tactial, Squad-Based shooter, which means that you do not have the luxury of being able to rush into things, guns blazing, and you can't be concerned only with your own character. This game requires a lot of thought, a lot of skill, and a fair amount of luck won't hurt either. If you're looking for run-and-gun action, this game will NOT suit you. However, if you're a patient marksman with some brains, you might enjoy it. I dropped one star on this game for the sake of its niche-market gameplay; the other star falls because of assorted things that are missing from this game that make it significantly harder. VISUALS (4/5): This game isn't pretty, but it's not exceptionally bad-looking either. However, this game suffers from two major visual flaws. 1. Some of the terrorists you battle in this game dress a lot like your own soldiers. Your moment of hesitance as you try to determine whether they are good or bad guys can cost you your life. (See Gameplay) 2. The terrain you face is always square and blocky. This isn't a terrible thing unto itself, but after a while you start to really dread corners, because there's always someone waiting to shoot you around EVERY corner. (See Gameplay) SOUNDS (3/5): Someone did his research and put some effort into making the guns sound realistic. That's good. Then again, there's no music at all during the actual mission sections of the game. That's not so good. Overall, the sound quality is neither overwhelming nor annoying. GAMEPLAY (3/5): This is the part where the "niche-market" gameplay comes in. The gameplay is split into two parts: 1. The first deals with the "Planning" stage of each mission. As with a real SWAT team, every move is planned in advance and executed with amazing precision, if no-one gets killed. In the planning stage, you are presented with a map of the arena in which you will be performing your counter-terrorist act. You select your soldiers, divide them into squads, and then mark routes for them to follow on the map and commands for them to execute at given points. For those who have never played a game like this before, understanding how to properly plan a mission can be even harder than executing it. The game can give you a pre-designed plan, but the pre-designed plans do not guarantee your squad's survival. Expect a sharp learning curve from the get-go. 2. The sexond is the "Execution" stage of the mission. In a nutshell, you take control of a member of a squad, and take it through its mission objectives. You can switch between squads at will, and different soldier types have different abilites you can exploit. Sound cool so far? Well, you should be warned that there's a few things that make the Execution phase very challenging, even on low difficulty modes. The biggest issue is the gun combat. The fighting in this game is "realistic," and by that I mean being shot once will probably kill you. Your bullet-proof vest and helmet apparently don't offer any protection against headshots, and your enemies are remarkably good at shooting through your armor. Now, if a squad-member dies, you can just switch to another one, but there's a serious issue with this approach to play because this game has a small RPG-aspect in it: your soldiers level up. Every time a man survives a mission, he gains a stat-point that you can use to increase his abilites, making him a better shooter, or more likely to survive a hit. For this reason, it is very inadvisable to ever let any soldiers die; every man you lose weakens the team, and you can only replace dead men with greenhorns that haven't leveled up much, if at all. So, the more mistakes you make, the more difficult the game becomes. Fun... The second issue is with several oversights in the game's interface that make your chances of being shot to death much more likely. For starters, the artificial intelligence of your squadmates is just unsophisticated enough that they will run into your line of fire or charge heedlessly into danger without looking around the corners first. You may expect them to die even more often than you do. For seconds, the grenades are extremely difficult to use; flashbangs are as likely to blind you as they are the enemy, and frag grenades have to be thrown exactly right or they will probably blow up at your feet. For thirds, there's generally no way of knowing where your enemies are without looking for them, and the mere act of looking ALWAYS exposes you to deadly enemy fire. Furthermore, you cannot crouch or crawl to make yourself less of a target, and your ability to look around corners is almost useless. This doesn't necessarily make the game un-fun, but it does make it very challenging, even on the lowest difficulty mode. If you want to get through a mission without losing a man, you need to plan hard and play even harder. Unlike most shooters, Rainnbow Six does not excuse any mistakes. STORY (2/5): Every mission you play through is like an isolated event, a map with a little bit of backstory; there is no added drama or epic-ness as you go from one mission to the next. It's very easy to stop caring about the backstory and become totally focused on the gameplay, and (as I see it) if a story is so unimportant that it can become totally marginalized, then it's not very good. OVERALL (3/5): This could be a wonderful game for some, and a terrible game for others. Consider your tastes carefully before buying this game, because you may find that it isn't worth the price if you're not up to a totally different kind of shooter experience.

Amazing game. I did use a glide wrapper to fix issues in some missions.