Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield, the third installment in the series, is a tactical squad-based tactical shooter set in the year 2005. The Rainbow Six series revolves around the exploits of team Rainbow, a multi-national group of counter-terror experts under the command of the United Nations. In many countries, local police forces aren't trained or prepared to defuse situations caused by well-armed and prepared terrorist. Rainbow's mission is to go in after all the negotiations have failed and swiftly put an end to any situation. In Raven Shield Team Rainbow sees action in a number of exotic locations ranging from Norway to the Caribbean to South America. The missions locals vary from a snow covered mountain village to a grimy meat packing plant to a top floor penthouse in downtown Buenos Aires. Some missions are straight eliminate the terrorist's type action, others the more tricky hostage rescue scenarios as we know those terrorists just love shooting hostages.

Missions start out in a planning stage where you assign members of the team (you select up to 3 sub-teams to control ~ 3 persons for each team), equip them, and devise a strategy. In the planning phase you'll see top-down view of the map and you determine which team goes where and you give tactical orders and so forth. Planning the missions is quite simple with a lot of commands and orders accessible via mouse selections. During the action phase you can control any squad and any member you want (you can give them simple orders), just one at a time, the AI takes care of the rest. Additionally, the game does come with pre-planned missions, where your team/equipment and tactical data is already done for you, you just have to either watch in observer mode or assume the role of 1 operative in first person perspective while issuing your orders. Of course, if you want to take the time to plan out the mission yourself, you can completely customize your mission from scratch.

Single player portion of the game contains 15 missions, ranging from an oil refinery to a private airport, to a mansion in tropics. The missions are all unique and contain a variety of mission themes, such as the familiar but fun hostage rescue, prevent terrorists from detonating a bomb, releasing nerve gas, or destroying important data. There's also a custom mission mode, which allows you to play the campaign missions you've successfully completed. Maybe I shouldn't forget to mention (for those of you who never played any Rainbow Six game) , that Raven Shield's gameplay is focused on stealth and one-shot-kill realism, so you will quickly find that the Quake-style FPS play - "run and gun" method won't work well in this game.Yeah, it's not a very fast paced game :P Instead, Raven Shield will make you think! If you played the previous rainbow titles you'll be right at home.

There are a total of 57 guns (including MTAR-21 9mm, Mac-11/9 9mm, Micro-Uzi 9mm, SR-2 9mm, USAS-12 12g, TAR-21 5.56mm, Type 95 5.56mm, VSS Vintorez 9x39mm, 23E 5.56mm) in the game and each of the weapons has five ratings: amount of damage, range, accuracy. Of course, all the weapons have their advantages and disadvantages but you have access to a good number of them from the outset. You can also customize weapons using four different weapon attachments: sound suppressor, thermal sniper scope attachment, high capacity magazine, and mini-scope. For game balancing reasons, each weapon can only have a one attachment at a time.

The multiplayer portion is by far the best of the game. You have the ability to do all the standard DM/TDM, or you can also play cooperatively against AI controlled terrorists. Both modes are great fun.

Overall, Raven Shield is a fantastic tactical shooter. If you are a fan of the Tom Clancy series of games this is a must for your collection. Here are links for SP Demo ~ MP Demo.

System requirements:
Minimum: 800 MHz Pentium III, AMD Athlon, or equivalent, 128 MB RAM (XP users: 256 MB required), 64MB DirectX 8.1b compatible graphics card, DirectX 8.1b compatible sound device, CD-ROM/DVD-ROM 16x or faster (not recommended for use with CD-RW drives), 1.7 GB HDD space
Recommended Configuration:
Recommended: 1.2 GHz Pentium 4, AMD Athlon or equivalent, 256 MB RAM, 128MB DirectX 9.0 compatible graphics card, DirectX 9.0 compatible sound device, CD-ROM/DVD-ROM 16x or faster (not recommended for use with CD-RW drives), 2 GB HDD space, Internet connection for play on Ubi.com (minimum 56k modem or broadband)