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3.5 Smileys - 1 Smiley Poor, 5 Smileys Excellent
Platforms: Mac OS, Windows 9x
General Impression Rogue Spear is a large, complex game. To attempt to talk about every aspect of it in a single review would be insane. On top of that, I'm not really an expert on weaponry or anti-terrorism, so I can't really comment on the realism of those aspects. What I am a self-appointed expert on, is what games are fun to play. My expert opinion is that Rogue Spear is most definitely fun to play. Normally I'm not much of a strategist. If it's a game that requires any more thought than remembering what button shoots and what one jumps, I tend to stay away. For Rogue Spear, however, I willingly make an exception. A fine blend of strategy and realistic action make this game a thrill to play.
Gameplay: Planning
The game has two distinct phases, the planning phase and the action phase. During the planning phase, you initially get briefed on the next mission -- usually involving hostages taken by some evil looking group of terrorists on some kind of nasty mission (detonating nuclear devices and the like). Another neat aspect of the briefing stage is you can look at information about previous missions too, namely newspaper clippings that show you how the press reported your actions to the world. After you're up to date on the new mission, you get to pick the operatives to have on your teams. This is where you look at each available operative's dossier and pick out up to eight of the members best suited for the current mission. Or, if you're like me, this is where you pick random dudes based on how cool they look; proceeding to give them the neatest looking armor and weapons you can equip them with. You then split the operatives you picked into up to four separate teams, each of which you can assign different orders to in the next screen. Once your teams are assembled you move on to the planning screen. This is a complicated set of controls that allow you to tell your team members what to do, and where and when to do it. While it may seem daunting at first, once you get the knack of it the planning screen can be kind of fun. Basically you map out where each of your teams goes and what to do at key points along the paths. The game also provides you with some (sometimes overcomplicated) pre-made plans that you can use, which is probably a good place to start. Once your plan has been laid out, it's time to put it into effect. This is accomplished in the action phase.
Gameplay: Action
You can control any of the team leaders from a first or third person view, or you can let the computer control them all. I've finished a few of the missions by just sitting back and leaving them to get on with it, only taking over at a vital point or when I needed to bend the plan. This phase of the game is similar in a lot of ways to other 3D shooters on the market, with the difference of realism. While in Quake III you can sometimes bear the explosions of two or three rockets before finally bursting into a shower of gibs, a single bullet in Rogue Spear is often enough to kill, or at least seriously disable. While in Unreal Tournament you can jump off a four-story building and tear across huge maps in mere seconds, you often need to crouch and sneak carefully in Rogue Spear to avoid being seen by terrorists. Other aspects such as the need to manually reload your weapons, and peeking around corners before running blind into possible enemies, adds an element of suspense and urgency to the action phase of Rogue Spear that isn't there nearly as strong in other 3D shooters. The missions you play often involve infiltrating some terrorist infested structure in order to rescue hostages. Rescuing the hostages is not just a matter of finding them; you must also escort them back to a safe zone. This means if you didn't make sure your path was clear on the way in, you better hope the terrorists you left alive are bad shots. One dead hostage means the mission has been failed, and you have to start over again from the start. This introduces what can either be seen as a weakness, or strength of the game. One mistake, no matter how much time you have spent executing your carefully designed plan, means starting over again from the beginning. If you're not a patient person, this can get pretty frustrating.
Multiplayer Madness
One thing that can often make or break a game is the inclusion of multiplayer gaming. Rogue Spear is one of those games where its single player features are so much fun that it doesn't even need multiplayer -- which is good. Although it includes support for multiplayer games, and lets you find games using GameRanger, actually playing Rogue Spear over the Internet has a lot of problems. The primary problem being lag; even on my cable modem I would often find myself face to face with enemies that had magically transported directly in front of me. This is a major problem in a game where single bullets can kill. Another problem is that if you played as the server, the game would sometimes crash, or mysteriously quit with no warning. Out of about five different games I tried playing, only one was satisfactorily lag-free, and even it wasn't perfect. This is one game in which I will probably stick to the single player missions.
Look At The Pretty Colors The graphics in Rogue Spear are decent, but not as clean or refined as other 3D shooters out these days. The models and terrains look somewhat polygonal, but this is made up for by the great animation of the character models. I'm not sure how they did it, but the characters in the game move in ways that look more human than in any other game I've seen. My one major beef with the graphics is the fact that people can pass through walls. Sometimes you'll be in a room and see a weird lump sticking out of the wall where there is no door or window. That's the butt of a guy in the next room. Heads, arms, entire torsos of dead bodies, they all have the uncanny ability to pass through solid walls and show up on the other side. It's not detrimental to game play, but it does kind of ruin the realism that the game tries so hard to achieve (and, for the most part, achieves).
Artificial Stupidity
I read everywhere that the A.I. in Rogue Spear is much improved from the game's predecessor, Rainbow Six. If that were the case, I'd hate to see the A.I. in Rainbow Six. Sometimes your computer controlled team mates can spot a terrorist, do a 180 degree spin, raise their scopes, and place a bullet neatly between the target's eyes all in a single fluid motion. At other times a whole row of them can be charging down a hallway past a terrorist that is clearly visible, allowing him to shoot them all dead, one by one. The terrorists themselves are not always the sharpest blades in the pack either. Sometimes you can shoot the head of one terrorist, and another terrorist that was standing right next to him will act like nothing happened. Perhaps the A.I. has some virtual denial routines built in. Overall the A.I. is not a terrible problem. Usually the computer controlled characters act in reasonable ways, but every now and then they'll all have a brain fart and it will cost you the mission.
Conclusion All said and done, Rogue Spear is a good game. It has its problems, it's not the greatest multiplayer game out there, the graphics aren't the most stunning you will see, but it's a lot of fun. It's realism makes it a suspenseful, nerve-racking game in which the failures are painful, and the victories are glorious. As an added bonus, the Mac version is shipped with an extra mission pack, Urban Operations. Same game play, new missions. The game itself plus the mission pack ensure that you will never get tired of playing Rogue Spear. If you like this type of game, and you've got the cash to shell out, then I'd definitely recommend it.
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