This is my first Rainbow six game. Rainbow six 3 is a first person shooter where you take the role of Ding Chavez. He and his team are sent around the world to stop a terrorist group. As the leader of the squad, you can give orders to the other three members of the team (Eddie Price, Dieter Weber, Louis Loiselle). Most first person shooters are fast paced and the fire fights are more constant and last a while before they end, but on R63 you spend time getting your team lined up for the fight. Terrorists are in the next room, there are three doors into the room so decide to split up and enter the room from two directions, or maybe you toss a flash bang in first before charging in and pumping the blinded baddies full of led. Maybe you've been injured in a previous skirmish and don't want to risk your life in the next encounter, so you order your team to head in first and do all the work for you. There are load of tactics to use, but sometimes they can be difficult to execute because of stupid AI. They generally do what there told but sometimes they can mess up bad an cause you to restart a mission, example, onetime I ordered my team to open a door and throw a grenade in to kill the terrorists inside, Louis tried the throw the grenade but in bounced of the frame of the door way and landed at our feet... Thankfully these AI problems are infrequent, the game generally plays well, if rather difficult. You and your team can only take around three to six bullets depending on the difficulty, and there are no medic kits. This adds tension to each mission knowing that if you mess up once, one of you will fall. To make things worse you can't save the game whenever you like, there is one checkpoint halfway through each mission but its still a big step back, it can be really annoying having to re-start halfway through a mission when you could have finished it if you survived only five more seconds. Peeking allows you to look and fire around corners while making it harder for the enemies to hit you, its easy to use and will reduce the amount of times you die.
The missions don't vary all that much, its the usual "Get from point A to B taking out all the bad guys" most of the time. Sometimes you have to disarm a bomb or rescue a hostage, it even asks you to escort the hostage's to the extraction zone on one annoying mission.
Besides the main campaign there's a custom mission mode, but it doesn't really let you customize a mission, you can select either practice mission which lets you play the campaign mission again, then there's terrorist hunt, where it takes out all mission objectives and lets you run through the map clearing out the terrorists. There's Co op where you can play the game with a friend, Co op can be very fun but the frame rate can drop to a stuttering mess at times. There is also multiplayer although I haven't played it so I cannot comment on it.
The sound effects in this game are mostly alright, but the gun SFX are great! They sound big and powerful, its a shame how other SFX are a bit of a lets down, they sound muffled and jumbled. The dialogue is not acted very well, but thankfully it isn't awful. To make things simple I will just make a list of the bad things in this game: Rare AI Glitches , no Medic kits, you can't go prone, it's easier to die in this game then it was on splinter cell , average sound and voice acting, the story is a typical first person shooter story that isn't that interesting, custom mission is simple. But there are also allot of good things about this game: Tense fire fights, great graphics, guns sound like guns, lots of guns to choose from , lots of squad tactics, thankfully enemies can take even less bullets than you, peeking is easy to use and effective, Co op can be fun.
Rainbow Six 3 is a good game even with all its flaws, its nothing brilliant but its worth playing, and it will keep you entertained for a few weeks, if you have a ps2 then you should pick it up.