In Tom Clancy's Raven Shield, the third game in the Rainbow Six franchise, the men and women of Rainbow return to thwart the plans of an evil madman out to recover hidden Nazi loot. This barebones plot is merely a tool to link the objective-based missions that are the meat and potatoes of the game.

A standard mission will start you off with a situational briefing and overview of your objectives. After the briefing you'll pick your team of up to eight operatives in as many as three different fire teams, and then outfit them with a wide variety of realistic weaponry. You can choose to map out a mission plan for you and your AI-driven team mates, or you can just drop into the mission and figure things out on the fly.

Raven Shield allows for cooperative and competitive online play, but unfortunately there's no mechanism that allows you to play cooperatively with friends through missions in a linear order with the storyline intact. This missing feature aside, cooperative play is still a great feature, and a refreshing break from standard death match play.

There are several significant improvements in Raven Shield, most notably the use of the Unreal graphics engine. It's vastly superior to previous games and provides crisp, clean graphics that are beautiful enough to help suspend disbelief--a feat that's typically more difficult for games with modern settings. New controls in Raven Shield such as incremental door-opening and fluid movement controls allow for much stealthier (and thus more fun) movement around the map.

Rainbow Six: Raven Shield should appeal to anyone who favours realism in games and is tired of fast-paced but mind-numbing first person shooters. --Jon Grover

The PC version has all the greatness of the old Rainbow 6s. Like mission plan and acturally allowing you to change from one character to the other. The console versions are just similer levels of a set path. Vegas 1 and 2, I hate you too!!! :(

After playing many FPS games that had a "Blow up everything in your way" gameplay it was nice to get my hands on a little more of a tactical game. Rainbow Six 3 breaks away from mindless shooting and adds alot more thought to the FPS genre.

The game puts you in control of a squad of 3 men who act as covering fire aswell as other back up and support. This adds to the games diversity and you feel a real sense of leadership as you command your troops. Also the game is alot more realistic to other FPS games, in RS3 if you take a couple bullets you die and if you happen to live you dont have any method of regaining your health as there are no health packs. This is one of the elements that makes the game so tactical, the minute you come under fire you become so cautious and become alot more aware of your surroundings looking for cover etc. The troops make you feel a sense of security to a degree but the minute you lose a man you really feel the loss and again become more and more cautious knowing your out numbered. However when you craft a tactical raid on a room full of terrorists with your team and neutralize the enemy with precision you also feel a great sense of achievement. The game has a gradual learning curve and the levels become difficult at a nice pace. A real big selling point to this game is the online capability. Playing RS3 on Xbox Live is really a totally different game compared to the regular story mode. with many modes online the best one being Team vs Team. Having a whole team of 8 men against another 8 really comes into its own, each person helping lead the team around really large multiplayer maps and helping pick off enemies hiding one by one is something that must be tried. Graphically the game is well made but nothing special. The musical score is nice too but to be fair a game like this doesnt really require much music.

Overall this is a really well made title by Ubi Soft and one that should be sitting on your Xbox library.

From everything I've read I thought this was a stealth game. The film at the beginning (which is one of the things that got the game its 2 stars) also suggested this. After playing the game its clear that this is not in fact the case. Running around shooting things is more a FPS thing, why your team members do everything so carefully (checking round corners etc.) I don't know, its a lot easier to just throw yourself round the corner and blast the enemy to pieces.

This really isn't the game I exspected it to be. I invisioned a Splinter Cell game but with a team of operatives instead of the one. If you want a stealth game buy one of the Splinter Cells (very good games all of them). Furthermore, as FPS's go this wasn't very good and apart from the film at the beginning the graphics weren't very pleasing either.

The one thing (apart from the film) that I liked was the Zulu command thing, it could have been good...

I fairly new to xbox and this was one of the first games I bought due to reviews, and high opinions of the game. I glad to say I think the game is great. Very realistic locations, detalied graphics and weapons and lots of fun to be had. You have 14 missions basically to shoot terrorists and defuse bombs rescue hostages. Some missions are great especailly like the Villa, Penthouse and The Rock rip off of Alcatraz sneaking into the shower area just like the film! I maybe new to xbox but think this early game is great value for money. You have a traininning mode for newbies to the gerne, practice any mission, or use a location just to hunt down terrorists. You have to be careful to as enemy AI is very good spotting you early, running away and investigating noises. You can choose your rifle and other weapons before the mission depending on what tactics area you are in, wide open spaces sniper rifle, close quarters sub-machine gun etc. You can also use night vision and thermal goggles to add to the fun. This is great fun and an Xbox live game to with new maps to download and hours of fun to be had at a bargain price. Scope this out!

Before you read further, I have to warn you that I didn't actually finish the game - I played about a third before trading it in.

I didn't like the game at all, even though I was a huge fan of the original game and it's various expansions. The first thing that annoyed me was the fact that the planning stage of the mission was left out - meaning that you could no longer craft tactics prior to starting.

I also felt that the game was hugely linear compared to previous efforts. The first mission is a prime example of this, with the only deviations being when a path briefly forked before rejoining.

The graphics weren't anything near the standard that I would've expected from Red Storm - the same company that gave us the brilliant Splinter Cell - and the voice acting started to bug me about five minutes in.

It felt like Rainbow Six-lite, and whilst some elements were fun, it felt like a game with potential rather than a top quality tactical squad shooter. You'd be better off going with Ghost Recon.