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Rogue Spear: Black Thorn

by James Sterrett

Article Type: Review
Article Date: January 07, 2002

Product Info

Product Name: Rogue Spear: Black Thorn
Category: Tactical Shooter
Developer: RedStorm
Publisher: RedStorm
Release Date: Released
Min. Spec: P2 266 or equiv.; Win9X/2000; 64MB RAM (128 rec.);2D 16-bit video/3D accel w/ 4 MB VRAM; 550 MB Free HD Space
Rec. Spec: 128 MB RAM; 3D accel. video w/ 16 MB VRAM; 1 GB Free HD Space
Files & Links: Click Here

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Back In The Day…

Remember 1999? Back then, a Pentium 3 with a Voodoo card was a big deal. 128Mb of RAM was lots. And Rainbow 6: Rogue Spear came into our world, and it was good. In fact, it was very good! It improved on Rainbow 6 in a number of ways, providing even more weapons and scenarios and ways to play the game. Now it’s 2002, and we’re got Rainbow 6: Rogue Spear: Black Thorn, which provides you with another 15 missions to play. Nine of them form a small mini-plot, in which a wacko starts re-creating famous terrorist acts from the past, while six of them are unconnected.

Tango's 'neutralized' in the men's room

Some of you may be wondering what the heck Rainbow 6: Rogue Spear is. Those of you who already know can skip past the following explanation. Back in the Stone Age - you know, 1997 - an unknown company hooked up with Tom Clancy and released a game called Rainbow 6. It offered unprecedented realism in a first-person shooter, with a one hit, one kill damage model, realistic weapon performance, and careful modeling of things like losses to shot accuracy for firing when moving. It single-handedly created and defined the “tactical shooter” genre. The plot put the player as the commander (the “6”) of an elite and secretive international counter-terrorist unit named “Rainbow”.

The locations look the part; this is a train station

The missions in the game revolved around various counter-terrorism operations, usually involving an assault on some kind of building in which you had to move fast and hard to save the lives of the hostages. Screw up, and the terrorists might slaughter the hostages, your team, or both. Helping in all this was an extensive and detailed pre-mission planning interface in which you could build ornate plans to ensure that your force (of up to eight soldiers in up to four teams) could coordinate their offensive.

Unfortunately, the AI for your squadmates was a bit dopey, and it would follow that pre-set plan with absolutely ruthless single-minded precision—even if the plan no longer corresponded to the action. You couldn’t tweak the plan on the fly, so the game often became a series of iterations trying to find a "perfect" plan that you and the AI could actually execute. Rogue Spear, released in 1999, improved the graphics, tweaked the planning interface, and provided a new plot for Rainbow to fight its way through. Now let’s go back to Black Thorn, which is an add-on for Rogue Spear.

More baddies dropped in a corridor

First, The Good News

Interestingly for an expansion pack (and priced accordingly), Black Thorn is completely stand-alone. You can play it even if Rogue Spear is not installed on your system—though you won't have the training missions from Rogue Spear. Moreover, being based on a game engine that’s a couple of years old means that it is stable and runs well on most machines out there: the minimum spec is a Pentium 233 with a 4Mb graphics card and 32Mb of RAM. Any machine sold in the last two years ought to handle the game without breaking a sweat. Add to these low entry requirements the fact that Rogue Spear is a good game, and you should have a winner, right? Fire up the mission planner and take out your old buddies on the Rainbow team for another kick at the terrorists and you’ll be a happy camper - right?

Deep in a munitions dump

Well, yes and no. There’s nothing wrong with Black Thorn, and viewed by itself, there’s a great deal about it that’s excellent. The new missions are interesting and varied—and some of them, especially the final plot mission, are bloody hard! You also get a wide variety of custom play options for the maps, which should keep boredom from setting in. Finally, the basic game design of Rogue Spear is solid: it’s one of the most realistic and enjoyable tactical shooters on the market, and it has enjoyed huge sales and great popularity for good reason. If you buy it, you won’t sit around wondering why you wasted money on a dog, because Black Thorn is fundamentally a good game.

If you liked Rogue Spear’s multiplayer—and it was a staple on our home LAN for nearly a year—then you’ll not be disappointed by Black Thorn, in which the options are seemingly endless. If you play an Adversarial or Adversarial with Terrorists game style, then you can choose among eleven different types of games, most of which are self-explanatory: Assassination, Scatter Assassination, Save Your Base, Double Bluff [a hostage-keeping/taking scenario], Double Stronghold, Survival, Team Survival, Scatter Team [Survival], Terrorist Hunt, Scatter Hunt, and Lone Wolf. Those favoring cooperative play get a mere five game types: Assault, Terrorist Hunt, Hostage Rescue, Defend, and Recon. As with the single-player angle of the game, the code here is known and tried and true, and between the multitude of play types and the variety of lesser options to alter gameplay, you’re likely to be quite happy.

Six ways to play fifteen missions

Now, The Bad News

The problem comes from the competition. Rogue Spear is getting old, and while the horse still gives a good go at the circuit, there are younger horses out there that pass it by. Newer games have flashier graphics, but Black Thorn looks good enough to get your pulse moving. Your AI buddies are pretty stupid compared to those in SWAT3 or Operation Flashpoint. Even the addition of some hotkeys for things such as “flashbang this room” and “attack this way” don’t help as much as they might, because the game isn’t built around these commands, and your buddies still want to follow in lockstep to the plan laid out before the mission began.

Enemies still always start in the same locations in plot missions, reducing the replay value of the standard missions. The fifteen missions seems a bit sparse after the sprawling mass of missions in Operation: Flashpoint. All in all, the problem with Black Thorn is that tactical shooter design has evolved beyond it. The graphics may not be the best, but they aren’t ugly; the mission design is solid too. What’s not up to par is the underlying engine design. Newer games have far better on-the-fly planning and better squadmate AI, producing a far more fluid and believable experience. Rainbow 6 was first, but it’s no longer best.

It isn't the Achille Lauro, but the idea is there

As a result, playing Black Thorn provides a definite feeling of “been there, done that, got the T-shirt”. The T-shirt is really nice, but there are better shirts out there now, and they don’t cost a lot more: Black Thorn costs about $30 (US), while Ghost Recon runs around $45 and Operation Flashpoint at $40. If you adore Rogue Spear, or if your machine cannot handle the newer offerings, or you don’t have the extra $10 to $15 to drop on them, then by all means buy Black Thorn. It is only disappointing when compared to its more advanced siblings.

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