Video Games : Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3: Athena Sword (Mac)

Rating: - Tom Clancy's Athena Sword (Mac)
This game is an excellent expansion pack for Raven Shield. The expansion pack extends the old storyline of the bio-terroists in Raven Shield, who have left supporters hidden in Europe. These supporters intend to seek revenge for the failure of their old plan by releasing nerve agents without any demands. Whilst seeking finance for their plan they mess up and take hostages in an Italian art muesum. Cue Rainbow.
The game can be difficult due to the large number of street fighting missions with snipers hiding in windows and wide, open courtyards, expect to lose a lot of your team very quickly. The maps are massive compared to the ones featrured in Raven Shield and are far more detailed both in graphics and sound, for instance, running through an American Lumberyard in the background you can hear the hoots of an owl or water in a fountain in the streets of milan. An amusing side effect that wasn't present in raven Shield is the larger number of background items that can be destroyed. In one mission I was standing next to a fire extingisher when a terroist opened fire hitting the extinghisher and covering everything in a white mist. The graphics seem to be a lot sharper than Raven Sheld and the game does seem to run faster on my computer than raven Shield which surprised me, although this could be due to updates and patches included in the Game that I hadn't downloaded for Raven Shield. The missions themselves are distinctly different to the standard missions, with the addition of timelimits in some scenarios. One mission has your team running through the old town of Dubrovnik, looking for a missing informant, in the style of Black hawk down, with people jumping out of side streets to shoot at you. Another mission has you acting as a bodyguard for the same informant when a bomb is placed in his hotel and you have 4 minutes to get him out and diffuse the bomb whilst fighting off terroists in the building. It was good to see the reworked missions from Rainbow Six and Rogue Spear, although in comparison to the rest of the missions in the expansion pack, I can't believe I sweated as much as I did when I played them for the first time.
The game is not perfect though, the new weapons although intresting are a lot quieter than the standard ones in rainbow Six 3, the weapons sounding as though they are all silenced by default, which is disconcerting and not what I expected from the guys who did the sound for the matrix. Strangly one of the multiplayer maps (Ferry Boat) is only available in the Lone wolf game and not in terroist hunt or hostage rescue, but all the others are. I can't understand why this is the case. Also if you are not keen on planning your own missions you might run into trouble, the pre-packaged ones appear badly thought out with teams running up and down the same set of stairs 5 or 6 times in one game or sitting around waiting for a go command that does not relate to the actions of any other team. The pre-planned missions in Raven Shield were very good. Its a shame these can't achieve the same standard.
Overall though the game is well worth getting even just for seeing the european maps which add a whole new dimension to the game with the huge amounts of detail on show. If you don't like the sound of that then just get the game for the new options in multiplayer, the improvements in graphics and sounds and the seven new weapons available to use.