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Rainbow Six 3: Athena Sword
by Jolex Del Pilar
Monday, May 3 2004
The expansion pack to Raven Shield may be short but there are surprises here for even the Rainbow Six hardcore.
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Title:
Rainbow Six 3: Athena Sword
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Platform:
PC Windows, Pentium II 800, 128MB Ram, 2 GB of HD space, 128 MB video card.
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Publisher:
Ubisoft |
Developer:
Red Storm Entertainment |
#
of Players: 1 - 16 |
Genre:
Action
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Origin:
United States
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Expected
Release:
March 2003 |
Grapevine:
It shouldn't be a surprise that the third game in the series has spawned its own expansion pack, the previous games in the series (Rainbow Six, Rogue Spear) had numerous expansions. |
Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield was a great game by many accounts in the media, and rightfully so. The game features a gameplay experience that I can honestly say I have not found besides in a Red Storm developed game. The tense, quiet, moments on a large map, where fortunes can be ended in mere seconds by a well hidden "tango" have become almost part of the gaming culture. Rainbow Six is that good of a series.
It shouldn't be a surprise that the third game in the series has spawned its own expansion pack, the previous games in the series (Rainbow Six, Rogue Spear) had numerous expansions. Athena Sword is the official expansion to Raven Shield and features a storyline that continues where Raven Shield left off. Without giving too much of it away, you'll be dealing with well armed "art thieves", hostage situations, and of course, Weapons of Mass Destruction, WMD for short (and to be pc). The new campaign has 8 missions that take place throughout the Meditarranean, beginning in Italy. The expansion also adds 5 new multiplayer maps, and 7 new weapons (of the conventional kind) for you to play with.
The campaign, although short, is pretty challenging. One thing that adds to the difficulty is the size of the maps. The maps in Raven Shield were large, but featured a lot of outdoor areas. The mainly indoor areas weren't nearly as large as the new maps featured in Athena Sword. The art musuem in Athena Sword is an absolute slaughterhouse during tango hunt, or even regular multiplayer team death match, just for the sheer size of the indoor and outdoor environment. There are just so many places to hide and snipe, which is known infamously as camping. The A.I doesn't seem to be any smarter than in previous incarnations of the game, so I'll assume everything was left the same in that arena.
One drawback to the larger maps is that Athena Sword has caused problems for people with lower spec systems. I've gotten e-mails saying that Athena Sword "jumps, and jerks" at all the wrong moments. Though the test system I have is a 2Ghz monster featuring the latest in Nvidia goodness, I still occasionally got a few frame rate "hiccups", which I can safely say is due to the new, somewhat larger maps. My best advice is to get the latest drivers for your video card, and drop some memory into that aging PC of yours.
If you look closely, you might recognize this map from a previous title in the Rainbow Six series.
Athena Sword also features a few maps from the the original Rainbow Six, and Rogue Spear. If you thought these maps were old, and forgotten, you have to see them in the Raven Shield graphics engine. They look spectacular.
The new multiplayer modes are actually kind of cool. They include adversarial terrorist hunt (who can eliminate the most terrorist?), capture the enemy (capture all the members of an opposing team), and kamikaze (a variant of Counter-Strike's diffuse the bomb missions). I especially liked the kamikaze multiplayer mode. It was always a thrill to be the green team and attempt to diffuse the bomb before red could set it off. In many ways I like Athena Sword's bomb diffusing mode better than the one featured in Counter-Strike for the simple reason that the team with the bomb must actually reach a detonator kit to set their weapon off. This forces the bomb team to not only defend, but to defend pro-actively, while moving. In CS, you had a lot of camping, and personally, I find it cowardly (pwn this!).
Apparently, Red Storm brought in some hotshot who worked on the audio for the Matrix movies to redo the sound for Athena Sword. While I can't really tell the difference, as Raven Shield sounded quite good to me, I can safely say the audio experience here hasn't degraded which is the most I can really hope for now days.
There is only really one gripe I have about this game and it involves the installation process. There's gotta be a cleaner way of doing this, perhaps loading everything directly onto the HD, and then deleting it when done. This 2 disc, swapping crap has got to go. I can't tell you how many "wrong disk in drive errors" I got before I actually installed Athena Sword correctly. Maybe part of it was impatience in waiting for the disk to read inside the drive, but it just seems like a hassle that could be streamlined, perhaps one day.
Athena Sword is a real nice addition to Raven Shield, despite its shortness, and messy installation process. It features 8 quality maps, some new weapons, and some cool new multiplayer modes. That being said, you need the original Raven Shield to play this expansion (make sure Raven Shield disc 2 is in the drive when playing, and not Athena Sword disc 2, or nothing will work). While Raven Shield is available for about $30, most people will think twice about buying both, at least until Ubisoft releases a 2-in-1 package that has both Raven Shield, and Athena Sword. However if you own Raven Shield, Athena Sword's price tag isn't high ($29.99), and it'll keep you happy until the next full incarnation of this sequel is ready to go.
--- Jolex Del Pilar, See you at E3!
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