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Review: Rogue SpearReviewed By: Bill Stiteler Review Date: March 1, 2001
Now I'm not positive, but I think I'm the only Mac game reviewer who's actually been trained to kill another human being. And in my opinion, despite what Katie Couric might hear from This Week's Expert or Very Concerned Mother, you're more likely to get useful combat training out of Whack-A-Mole than Quake 3. Sorry, M4j0rfr4gg0r, but you are not, in reality, a killing machine. You're just a kid, playing a game. Ultimately, all computer games are no more realistic than any mid-80's action series from the mind of Brandon Tartikoff: The Master, A-Team, Knight Rider... That in mind, Tom Clancy's Rogue Spear, the sequel to Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, prides itself on its realistic approach, at which it succeeds if you're into that sort of thing. The game is a shooter, but set in the world of anti-terrorism. You control an international SWAT team of sorts who's job is to go in and defeat the bad guys before they can kill the hostages, detonate the nuke, or promote their environmentalist causes by blowing up an oil tanker. I don't get that last one either.
After the planning is done, you take charge of one of the teams, and after you get killed, go back and adjust the plan until all the objectives are achieved. And you will get killed. A lot. Just like in real life, a single bullet in Rogue Spear can take you down. There are no power-ups or health packs waiting for you in the crates. The way to succeed in this game is learn the rules of entry, use stealth whenever possible, and plan, plan, plan. Just be prepared to revise the plan frequently.
I came to an epiphany, however, while playing Urban Operations, a free bonus pack included on the Mac version (bite me, PC users!). Urban Operations focuses on missions that take place in populated...well, urban areas. As you might expect, this involves a lot of tight corners with a lot of places for bad guys to hole up. The mission was to extract hostages from a building in a Middle Eastern marketplace, and my team leader "went and got himself kilt," as we used to say. My perspective then switched to the next player, who got shot by the same terrorist. I switched to the next character in the team, and "downed the Tango." The thing was, though, my plan had disappeared. In Rogue Spear, you see, you have a picture-in-picture screen that shows where your character is, along with a line guiding them to the next waypoint on the plan you've set up. One of the more annoying bugs which exists in the game is that sometimes, no matter how hard you walk over an area, your character won't "pick up" the waypoint, and won't update automatically. But this time it had just disappeared altogether.
It was then that I stopped playing Tom Clancy's Rogue Spear, and started playing John Woo's Rogue Spear. Restarting the mission, I sent in one agent, armed to the teeth, with no plan other than a thorough knowledge of the area, bought with the blood of his comrades. It worked. After two tries I finished the first mission, losing the first time only after I took a wrong turn and came out with the hostages into an area I hadn't cleared yet. I fixed that error in judgement by spraying the area before entering the next time. I must say, I didn't play the game strictly according to the rules of a John Woo film. Since Rogue Spear limits you to two firearms, I did reload, rather than simply discarding the gun and grabbing another. I did crouch at times, rather than simply walking towards enemies, firing the whole time. But really, the whole planning phase consisted of a starting point and as much ammo as I could carry.
I'm not suggesting this makes Rogue Spear a bad game. It's not. I enjoyed Rainbow Six immensely, and only snapped because Rogue Spear is more challenging; the terrorists use the layout to their advantage, and they behave a bit more intelligently. Rogue Spear is Rainbow Six taken to a (slightly) higher level. But there's got to be something odd about a game when I start doing better by playing it exactly the opposite of the way it's meant to be played. The strategy aspect of Rogue Spear is engrossing, I just got tired of being clipped all the time, leading to my deranged (and ultimately successful) Better Tomorrow-style rampage. Perhaps this is why there's so little crime in China; Communism and oppression of civil rights have nothing to do with it. It's just that criminals know they're going to have to deal with an unstoppable maniac dropping shell casings like raindrops. I think Clancy and Co. may have picked up on this; Rogue Spear includes two new play options--Lone Wolf and Terrorist Hunt--which you can play on any level provided you've already completed it according to "the rules." Both involve rampant gunplay as their main theme. In Terrorist Hunt, you lead your team in trying to eliminate thirty randomly-placed terrorists from the level. In Lone Wolf, you have one character trying to make it to safety. I think it's Red Storm's way of saying, "Good job of working out the intellectual aspect of this game. Now blast away!" Thanks for throwing me the bone, guys, but it's too late. I've learned that this world will not be saved by a group of highly-trained, efficiently organized patriots, working off inflexible rules of engagement designed by old soldiers and so-called "tactical experts;" that this is not a struggle of nation against nation, or ideology against ideology, but of man against man and that ultimately one man can make a difference. A lone crusader in the dangerous world... The world...of the Knight Rider.
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You can, of course, use the plan "provided by HQ," if you want, but after a few goes, I found them hopelessly overcomplicated. Instead of sending in a recon unit with silenced weapons to take out the guards, for example, "HQ" recommended two assault teams of five people striking simultaneously. Perhaps this is how real anti-terrorist teams work, but I found it almost impossible to coordinate an effective strike. I was getting killed a lot, much more than I remember from Rainbow Six. The terrorists were on to me, and every plan I could come up with ended with at least one hostage or team member dead. I was getting frustrated.
It was then that I realized: this wasn't a bug. After seeing her two teammates shot dead by the terrorists, the third character had snapped. To hell with the plan! It got Chavez and Gennedy killed! Where were those genius planners now? Sitting in a nice, safe secure building in Paris, drinking wine and watching French soap operas! Eighteen times; eighteen times we'd tried this plan and variations of it, and we'd been shot to pieces ever time! The time for plans was over.
It was even more bizarre during the next mission. Set in a British subway station, I wisely (according to my viewing of multiple Hong Kong cop movies) chose a high-powered 7.62mm sniper rifle as my weapon for what was described as a "stealth essential" mission. Starting at the end of a tunnel, I turned on the scope and shot the first terrorist. The rifle made so much noise that more of them started running down the tunnel to investigate, right into the middle of my crosshairs. At the end of it, I was standing in a pile of bodies, with no dead hostages.