The hostages are just beyond the door. This very moment there's a man with a shotgun leveled at their heads. Your team crouches beside you, waiting for the go code. Don't make a sound. Not yet. Then, with a whisper in your radio, Gold team signals that they're in position at the other entrance to the room. You crack open the door; "Flashbang, out!" A pop and a burst of white light. "Go go go!" you hiss into the radio, bursting through the side entrance. The terrorists are stunned. Rifles and handguns explode into deafening gunfire. But are the hostages still alive? ... Are you?

When the original Rainbow Six hit the gaming world in 1998, it took a fresh new approach to first-person games. Instead of running and gunning with everything you had, Rainbow Six was a game of precision, planning, teamwork, and execution. It spawned a whole genre of what we call "Tactical Games," where realistic maps, weapons, and situations were employed and the emphasis was as much on planning an operation as it was on shooting bad guys. For every mission, you hand-pick the people on your team and the gear they're to use. You plan out everyone's route. When it comes time to execute, you drop into a first-person perspective, call out go-codes to the other squads, and try to disarm the bomb, free the hostages, plant the bugs, or whatever it is that thee free world demands -- preferably with a minimum of casualties. Planning was everything: Hell, there's even an auto-aim feature active by default, so that the emphasis is always on tactics, not on twitch skills.

Rainbow Six: Raven Shield is the third game in the series if you don't count expansion packs. It embodies everything a good tactical game should be. Gamers hungry for balls-out action and explosive pyrotechnics should look elsewhere: This is a game about patience, stealth, and teamwork. There's nothing new or earth-shaking here, and to be honest, after the series has been around five years it's a little disappointing to see that the AI still isn't quite where it needs to be. But the gripes are minor; Rainbow Six: Raven Shield is incredibly engaging, especially when played online. It's simply the best tactical shooter currently available on the PC.

What's Changed and What's New

For longtime fans of the series, the biggest and most dramatic change is that Raven Shield makes use of the Unreal engine instead of a homebrew. You can feel this in the gameplay: control and movement are tight. The new engine and the power of today's PCs also allowed Ubi Soft Montreal to create environments laden with detail.

Planning is easier than ever. The whole level is loaded into memory as you bring up the planning screen, so as you set waypoints for your teams, you can also see the actual game level from first-person perspective in a preview window. "Will my sniper be able to get a clear shot at the doorway from here?" Now you can tell for sure.

During the mission itself you can dynamically give orders to your teammates with ease. A context-sensitive action button allows you to give different orders based on where you're looking. You can look at a door, for instance, and click a button to order your team to open it. By glancing at your feet and clicking the button you'll tell your team to get in formation with you and begin following. This was a great addition to the series.

Heavily armored operatives rush to the scene of a London bank heist.
A couple small changes also refined the gameplay. You can now slowly creep open a doorway by using your mousewheel. This is a brilliant gameplay mechanism allowing you to peek inside of rooms or toss in a grenade and quickly close a door. The "Heartbeat Sensor" -- a somewhat fictional piece of equipment used in the other Rainbow games -- now works like a pair of goggles that your character puts on showing the locations of people (but not their distance) on your main view instead of a top-down mini-map. This is a great deal more immersive than previous games, and creates some fun situations ("Is he in the room, or in the hallway on the other side? There are two blips -- which is the hostage?")

Raven Shield, of course, has all-new maps and an even bigger selection of weapons and equipment (you can even carry machine pistols as secondary weapons -- sweet!) Beyond the new engine, there are no bold sweeping changes here: this is a Rainbow Six game through and through.