A pioneer of tactical shooter games.
Rogue Spear for PC was my intro into tactical FPS games back around 2000, I played it on a friends computer. Since then, i've played most of the recent Rainbow Six games. As is expected, Rogue Spear doesn't live up to the new Rainbow games in any way, but it's still fun to play. The storyline is good old Tom Clancy style "neutralize terrorists, rescue hostages." Can't go wrong there. The graphics aren't the greatest the Dreamcast has to offer, but they work, and they're not bad considering the age of the game. The gameplay isn't bad, but the controls aren't the greatest. It takes a few buttons and most of your attention to do simple things like crouch or give commands. And surprisingly there's no way to peek around corners, unless I just couldn't figure out how to do that. Which brings me to another complaint, the so called "tutorial". I didn't get the manual with the $3 game, so I was hoping the tutorial would help. I'm not even sure why it's called a tutorial, it offers absolutely no advice or help. You pick which tutorial you want (firing range, obstacle course, etc...) and it plops you down there, but it doesn't explain the controls or anything else, or even what you're supposed to do there. Fortunately, once you start playing the missions, everything pretty much falls into place and it's fairly easy to figure things out.
All in all, not a bad game, it's worth playing even if it's just for nostalgic reasons. Strictly new-school gamers probably won't enjoy it, it's just too dated and weak compared to it's current counterparts.