Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3: Athena Sword

The Good
Depending on your point of view, Tom Clancy games are either well supported or are structured to pull in every available buck. This expansion pack for Rainbow Six 3 follows two years after the anti-terror campaign dubbed Raven Shield. Although the main game’s neo-fascist network was thought quelled, new events indicate that it still has some life.

The Athena Sword campaign is a series of eight missions set in the Mediterranean. Starting with a hostage situation in a castle turned art museum, it’s up to Team RAINBOW to fight terror by freeing hostages, disarming bombs, and disrupting the terror network. Athena Sword patches Raven Shield to v1.54 and adds new weapons. My personal favorite is the OTs-14 Groza—based solely on its appearance and the sound it makes when fired. Athena Sword also adds a new custom mission type and updates three classic Rainbow Six missions.

Even before taking into account the detailed textures and stunning audio, Athena Sword has some of the greatest maps in the franchise’s history. Beginning with a multistory art museum overlooking a courtyard, with wooden scaffolding and sinister subbasements, and filled with works of art, Athena Sword shows a real design emphasis on capturing the flavor of a region and adapting it to the needs of a tactical squad-based shooter. Even something as mundane as a warehouse in Palermo feels vibrant… and unsettling since a terrorist could be hidden anywhere. Somehow, it doesn’t even feel repetitious to feature this map or a hotel map twice, since the mission objectives and times of engagement differ.

Speaking of the hotel map, Athena Sword has a brilliant scenario where you have to lead an informant from his hotel room to the parking garage while a terrorist strike force is attempting to eliminate him. In a timed mission, you have to rush the informant to safety while taking out tangos and disarming bombs, all in just a matter of minutes. For those who like this added pressure, Custom Missions down have a Count Down option similar to this.

Like previous expansions, this one revamps three classic missions. Steel Wind is the most classic of classic missions, being the first mission from the original Rainbow Six: a hostage rescue mission set in London’s Belgian embassy. Sargasso Fade is the Siberian Base mission from where RAINBOW must plant a demolition charge to shut down the base’s communications center. This mission was actually a lead in to Rogue Spear’s Majestic Gold which featured a full-on raid of the base, so Sargasso Fade, here, seems to end abruptly. Lastly, Virgin Moon originally appeared in the Urban Operations expansion to Rogue Spear. Here, Irish Loyalists have taken hostages in the London Underground and RAINBOW must liberate them.

The Bad
As a game, Athena Sword retains the problems I addressed in my Raven Shield review. As an expansion, it’s only weakness is its price.

Aside from the standalone Black Thorn expansion to Rogue Spear, Athena Sword has the most missions of any Rainbow Six expansion pack. It’s worth getting as far as content, but I could understand players being hesitant at its original market price of $30. That’s a high price to extend the life of single-player gaming for roughly five hours. Of course the Gold Edition of Rainbow Six 3 includes Raven Shield and Athena Sword and makes this discussion moot.

The Bottom Line
Masters of Doom (a must read for gamers) quotes John Carmack as saying, “Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie; it's expected to be there, but it's not that important." It’s a debatable point, but there is something to be said for products like Athena Sword, which is merely a series of great maps and great mission objectives loosely connected together. Do I really care about some nebulous neo-fascist organization? No, but tell me I have three minutes to flee a building before it explodes and suddenly I care bunches.