Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six

2026-06-13
This is 90s PC gaming to its absolute core. A hodge-podge of systems and mechanics slammed together in a pleasingly janky way. All wrapped up in a UI so cyclopean and hostile it makes QuickBooks look like Animal Crossing.

One half is the absolute galaxy-brained, señor Autismo mission planning side. A roster of operatives with unique names, fleshed out 1-pager backgrounds, and enumerated stats I don't understand like Aggression, Self Control, and Leadership. How does an NPC exercise leadership and self control? Fuck if I know. But we really gotta move on to kit selection: what type of armor, what guns, what grenades, door charges, flashbangs, heartbeat sensors, magazines do you want your crew fitted with? A quick pass through team assignment to split your brave men and women into Blue, Red, Green, and Gold teams. And then you enter the Matrix: the Planning screen. 50 buttons, a full detailed 3D map of the level with hostages, landmarks, terrorists pointed out. And across the whole thing, an absolute explosion of Blue, Red, Green, and Gold arrows pinging all around the map, each color corresponding to the specific route those teams will take when you start the level.

Planning is an incredible distillation of the dream of leading a team of operatives, surgically breaching a building, euthanizing tangos, and escorting the package to safety. "Yeah, I'm fucking Tom Clancy," I say chomping on my cigar, pulling my Sig Sauer hat down, and proceeding to lay down some killer fucking arrows on this pixellated blueprint. Only I'm not doing that because this was a UI designed in 1998 and it is tedious as FUCK to do any of this. There are seven pages in the manual dedicated to just this screen. I will not read them. I am not Tom Clancy, I am Timmy Clancy, his mentally challenged cousin. I just want to put on a ski mask and shoot the guns. So I click Load Plan to load the preset plan for each mission--because the benevolent developers must have known a bunch of us would not be fucking with their 140 IQ interface--and I dive in.

After remapping the controls which are fucking insane--arrow keys for movement, reload is like 0 on the numpad, which I don't even have on this keyboard, HOME, INS, END, all enter the mix because, sure, let's give our game tax software controls, right? And after I figure out how to make the rest of the teams move via the whole Go Codes and Rules of Engagement systems. Which, to be clear, I do NOT know what either of those are, but I do know that if I spam the button that tells each team to go, they will go. After all this, now I can play.

I enter the first room and am shot and killed instantly. I am cycled to the next person in the group who has by this point insta-killed the enemy. It turns out, every NPC in this game instantly kills everyone else if they see them. It is like laser tag played by polygonally-challenged robots. And it turns out this means you win by two means.

One: in the early levels, numbers. You have more people in each unit than the enemy has in each room so your laser tag team will always win.

Two: in the later levels, planning. That whole thing we went over at the start where I said "I don't know what any of this is and also I'm mentally challenged"--yeah that is actually how you win. I hit mission 4 and no matter how much I creeped, how precise I was in clearing rooms and not being hit, my teammates would get massacred. We were outgunned and the only way to come out on top was to have a better plan. Use the right gear, clear the right rooms in the right order, from the right angle.

A couple missions back I almost called it. I'm fighting the 90s jank. My teammates get stuck moshing in the corner with the hostage, spamming the radio with "Escorting precious cargo escorting precious cargo". When they finally get the hostage out, she gets shot in the back because they didn't clear a room.

But then I channeled Tom. I tightened up my orders. Send Green into the basement only after Blue clears from the right. I snake around the back, taking out the two jabronis with AKs waiting to bust in during the third phase. Try after try I got further and further till finally I had the perfect plan and perfect execution. It was fascinating to watch this little clockwork play I put together come to life. When I hit the wall in mission 4, I realized one perfect mission was enough. Looking in the mirror I saw the gaze of feeble-brained Timmy looking back. I know who I am, and I just ain't Rainbow Six material.