Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear was released by Red Storm Entertainment in 1999 as a sequel to the first Rainbow Six, expanding on its recipe for a realistic tactical shooter built as much on preparation as on the action itself. Before each mission, the player draws up a plan of advance for multiple teams, sets routes, entry points, loadouts, and precise timing of actions, and only then watches how that plan plays out in the actual operation — a single hit is often enough to kill the character, so caution and thorough preparation carry more weight than reflexes and quick reactions. The missions are drawn from both fictional and realistically inspired counter-terrorist operations around the world, from rescuing hostages on a plane or a ship to disarming explosives and apprehending suspects.

Compared to the first game, Rogue Spear offered improved graphics, more missions, a wider selection of weapons, and expanded options for configuring the team's equipment before an operation, letting the player tailor tactics to a specific situation in much greater detail. The game later received several expansion packs adding more missions, weapons, and environments, showing just how strong a player base it managed to build. Its multiplayer, which pitted small teams of players against each other in a one-life mode with no respawns, was one of the things that kept the game alive over the long term within the community of tactical-shooter fans and competitive clan matches of the era.

At the time, Rogue Spear was received as a successful improvement over the original Rainbow Six, and together with SWAT 3 it shaped the tactical military shooter genre at the end of the nineties, when the emphasis on planning and realism stood in direct contrast to fast-paced action shooters. Today it is seen as one of the cornerstones of the entire Rainbow Six series, which years later led to the massively popular Rainbow Six Siege, and as proof that thorough planning could be just as tense in a shooter as the firefight itself.

Why play it: As one of the cornerstones of a series that later led to Rainbow Six Siege, Rogue Spear shows just how tense thorough mission planning could be, even before the firefight itself begins.