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.
Spellforce is not a bad game, but there are a few pacing and gameplay issues that make it less desirable than some of the other games on this site. Like Septerra Core, I can recommend it most strongly as a good time-waster, but not so much as a good game. SOUNDS (2/5): It all sounds very standard, really. Blaring trumpet fantasy-tracks, the same fire noises and sword-clashing noises that everyone else uses... but that's not why I gave it a 2. I gave it a 2 because the voice acting is so bad it's almost funny, at least in the Order of Dawn campaign. It's slightly better in the other campaigns, but still less than stellar. VISUALS (4/5): This game is pretty. Maybe too pretty, given how much it lagged on my computer, but there's no questioning that this game looks nice. The animations could stand to be a little better, particularly when characters are having a conversation, but overall I can offer no strong complaints against the game's graphics. STORY (4/5): The plot's fairly well-written, and in particular I was impressed with the Order of Dawn campaign's ending. However, the story is marred by bad delivery. The voice acting, as previously mentioned, is mostly garbage, and the gameplay can make it hard for you to really enjoy the story, or even remember exactly what the story is. GAMEPLAY (3/5): It's a solid concept, it really is. The idea of building stuff up, amassing armies, and then unleashing them to destroy your enemies is a tried, tested, and true way to play a game. Spellforce, however, suffers from three major problems. 1. Clunky interface. If you're directing a large army, it can be difficult to select a particular unit on the battlefield seen from above unless you zoom in close, and then you can't see what the rest of your units are doing. The AI can be kind of clunky, too; if you ctrl+right mouse button to make your units travel to a particular part of the map and kill anything in their path, you may find that they're walking back and forth along a line for no clear reason after they've finished a fight. 2. Unclear system. If you want to build a good character, you need to do at least a little bit of planning in advance, but the manual is completely unhelpful when it comes to describing what the different skills are good for and what the different spells are. As a result, character creation is largely a process of trial and error. On top of that, you can never see the numerical stats of any units besides your heroes. You might know a unit's level, and be able to tell if that it has half it's health, a quarter of its mana, and certain spell effects on, but you can't actually see attack and defense numbers for your troops. This can make strategic planning difficult. 3. PACING! This game is far, far too slow. It takes an arbitrarily long time for units to cross the vast battlefields, and there's no way to speed this process up, or slow it down if you feel so inclined. An Active Pause feature and/or a speed dial is something that EVERY self-respecting RTS must have, and the fact that Spellforce lacks both of these things is reason enough to dock some points. PRICE FOR VALUE/OVERALL (3/5): There's many, many hours of play in this game, or I'd consider giving it a 2. However, given its length and its relatively low price, I can say that this game is okay. Not bad or good, but okay.
