Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear is a 1999 tactical first-person shooter video game developed and published by Red Storm Entertainment for Microsoft Windows, with later ports for the Dreamcast, Mac OS, PlayStation, and Game Boy Advance. The sequel to 1998's Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, it is the second installment in the Rainbow Six series and the last to be published by Red Storm before its acquisition by Ubi Soft in 2000. The game's plot follows the secret international counterterrorist organization Rainbow as they investigate nuclear terrorism in Eastern Europe.
Rogue Spear uses the same game engine as the original Rainbow Six, albeit with new and improved additions and refreshed graphics and visuals. Like its predecessor, Rogue Spear focuses on realism, planning, strategy, and teamwork.
Rogue Spear was released on August 31, 1999 to mixed but generally positive reviews from critics, who praised its significant improvements on the original Rainbow Six's formula but criticized issues with AI behavior and gameplay mechanic consistency. The game sold over 200,000 copies in its first year of release, with almost 500,000 copies sold by 2006. It was nominated for numerous accolades and has been considered one of the best action games of 1999.
A PlayStation 2 port was announced, but was ultimately canceled. Three expansion packs for the game were released between 2000 and 2001, adding new missions, weapons, characters, and assorted materials. Two spin-off games—Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Lone Wolf, a PlayStation exclusive; and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Take-Down – Missions in Korea, using Rogue Spear's engine—were released in 2002 and 2003 respectively. A sequel, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield, was released in 2003. In 2006, the United States Department of Defense licensed Rogue Spear's engine for use in training simulation programs.
Gameplay
Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear is a tactical shooter, in which characters are affected by realistic factors and can be killed with a single bullet, thus promoting planning and tactics over force and firepower. Rogue Spear is very similar to its predecessor, Rainbow Six, and uses the same engine and gameplay, albeit greatly modified to feature improved graphics and animations, improved artificial intelligence, and new mechanics such as camouflage selection and the return of the hands-off "watch" mode from Rainbow Six: Eagle Watch.
Rogue Spear's basic gameplay remains mostly unchanged from Rainbow Six. The game follows a campaign of several missions, with objectives ranging from rescuing hostages and defusing bombs to gathering intelligence and planting surveillance devices; there are various approaches the player can take to complete said objectives, but Rogue Spear takes an approach that promotes stealth, as enemies can now react to the player's presence if they are heard or seen, such as investigating the area, fleeing, or attacking hostages. Before each mission is a briefing that details the situation and advances the plot, and a planning stage where the player selects the Rainbow operatives they want for the operation (categorized into Assault, Demolitions, Electronics, Recon, and Sniper based on their skillsets), sets waypoints and orders for their color-coded teams on a map of the area of operations, and equips their operatives with appropriate weapons, equipment, and uniforms for the mission. During the mission, the player can control the leader of any team at will, while teams not controlled by the player follow the orders assigned to them in planning. Injured operatives cannot be healed during a mission, while deceased operatives are permanently gone for the rest of the campaign playthrough, forcing players to plan carefully to avoid casualties.
Rogue Spear features two free-play modes outside the campaign: Lone Wolf, where the player must complete an entire level using only a single operative; and Terrorist Hunt, where the player must defeat up to 30 terrorists in a level, with no other objectives aside from clearing the entire level of enemies.
Rogue Spear's online multiplayer consists of two modes: cooperative and adversarial. Cooperative mode has players team up to complete missions against AI-controlled enemies in formats similar to the singleplayer missions, while adversarial mode pits players against one another in deathmatch and team deathmatch modes. Rogue Spear does not support dedicated servers, and games are limited to sixteen players per server.