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Gameplay
There's not a whole lot to say here if you've already played any of the previous games in the Rainbow Six series, and it's likely that, since you're reading this review, you have. For the sake of detail, however, here's how the game works.
Sum of All Fears plays much like a first-person shooter, with much less emphasis on the guns-a-blazing style of gameplay found in most FPS titles. The key here is stealth and strategy. The less your enemy knows about you, the easier it is for you to neutralize them. A single well-placed shot from a terrorist can ruin your day really quick, especially if one of your mission requirements is that you lose no members of your team in combat.
Sum of All Fears features a wide variety of weapons for you to use, but unlike most traditional FPS titles, you're restricted to the weapons you choose prior to the mission plan. This means that, should you run out of ammunition, you can't just pick up a terrorist's weapon and keep going. For the most part, you shouldn't really have a dire need for ammunition in the game. The only weapons I ever had supply issues with were the flashbangs and grenades.
Flashbangs are supposed to be one of the staple tools of the Hostage Rescue Team; It's a non-lethal stun grenade which disables enemy units within the blast radius. This is particularly ideal in close-quarters situations when you have hostages being held in the same room as guards. Since you don't want the hostages killed, you have to use your gunfire judiciously, and flashbangs work well to offer you the opportunity of first strike. Obviously, grenades are the more lethal version of flashbangs, for when hostages aren't a factor, or you have no such reservations about any non-combatants in the area.
Another useful item in Rainbow Six was the heartbeat detector. Basically, you equip it and it sounds a range tone to indicate if there are any people in front of it, perhaps behind a door or wall. Unfortunately, its usefulness is vastly limited in Sum of All Fears, since you very rarely have close-quarters combat situations which necessitate enemy detection.
The Hostage Rescue Team units operate in groups of three, which means you'll always have two teammates to be responsible for. Unlike the earlier games, where your teammates followed their own orders and offered fire support, your immediate HRT teammates will accept orders from you, such as tossing a flashbang into a room, or securing a particular area, or just plain staying put. My only beef with them is that they have virtually no intelligence with regards to how to toss a grenade into a room. They open the door wide open, wait a few seconds, toss the grenade, don't bother to actually close the door again…It's about the worst possible way to handle stealth. They should just crack the door a bit, toss it in through the crack, and then pull and hold the door shut.
All in all, it seems like the game is lacking in tactics and is more about in-the-field strategy of where to deploy your teammates, and how best to approach a situation with an unknown number of Tangos. This really can't be held against Red Storm, though, since they were aiming for an action-based title that people could easily get into. On the other hand, despite how easily people can get into it, they'll get out of it pretty quickly - It only has eleven missions, and those missions have a tendency of being short.
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