User Reviews (1 - 11 of 25)

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Wait until the price drops to buy

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 15 / 15
Date: March 11, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Despite the rave reviews by UbiSoft employees posing as customers, Athena Sword, like Raven Shield, is substandard and buggy.

UbiSoft has a tendency to buy companies with hit titles, and then have their own development teams produce lower quality sequels, hoping to make sales on the strength of the original games' reputations. Ever since UbiSoft bought Red Storm Entertainment and started producing the Rainbow Six games themselves the gameplay has changed for the worse, the story lines have become increasingly contrived and obviously written with more concern for political correctness than realism, and the bugs have been out of control.

There have been over a dozen patches released for Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield since it's release, and Athena Sword has even more bugs. I have never owned a game which required so many patches.

The online play is nowhere near as good as Rogue Spear (although better than Counter Strike, if you prefer realistic tactical shooters to the run-and-gun arcade style games) and the single player campaigns aren't challenging enough to provide more than a few hours of entertainment.

If you've already bought Raven Shield and are considering buying Athena Sword, my suggestion would be to wait until the price drops, which is closer to it's actual worth. In the meanwhile, there are plenty of better designed user-made levels for single player and multiplayer play available for free download all over the internet if you're looking for more content for Raven Shield.

Here are a couple of the problems and bugs found so far:

While prone with the M240G Heavy Machine Gun, there is no animation of the belt being fed through the receiver

While using an Athena Sword weapon the hand and arm models in first person view have holes in the geometry

The SM4 CQB Machine Gun points around a 15º angle up

All of the Athena Sword weapons have the same firing sound with small tweeking, and not the awesome new sounds Ubi promised

The G3A3 and the G3KA4 appear to be identical to the player except for color

There are areas where textures which are supposed to be Flagged as false backdrop are not, and the skybox does not show through like it is supposed to

Wait to Buy - If You Buy at all

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 10 / 10
Date: March 12, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Back 12 patches ago I swore I wouldn't give UBI more money. Well, I lied and I purchased Athena Sword for $29.99 two days ago from EB Games. After playing for 2 days here's my 2 cents.

The new maps are poorly optimized. The strongest of computers will yield you such poor FPS in many spots you wonder why you paid $30 for the game. The new game play modes are kind of interesting, but that's it. "Kind of" interesting.

Basically, Athena Sword is a $30 map pack. You can find equal to or better maps made by the modding community and play them on Raven Shield that not only run better, but are free.

If you MUST HAVE Athena Sword wait until the price drops to $10 or $15. It won't take long for the price to drop.

Raven Shield (full version) is selling for $15 at Best Buy in the US, so I can't imagine Athena Sword lasting at $29.99 for very long.

It's just not worth $30. Hang tight until it's cheaper. Die hard Rainbow Six fans may feel driven to buy it out of loyalty to the game like me. To all you hard core Clancy fans... try to resist the urge and wait if you purchase it at all.

Read this before you buy this game.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 10
Date: March 29, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This game has major problems if you're buying it for your PC. Ubi.com has many patches you can download but after 2 weeks the game still won't run on my PC which meets all the criteria it asks for. Before buying check www.ubi.com message boards to see all the problems people are having with this game. I have the other Rainbow Six games and haven't had any problem with them.

bad games

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: March 12, 2004
Author: Amazon User

A very poor effort to say the least, made even more pathetic by the fact that paid employees were obviously instructed to come here & write fake reviews over a month before it was even released... Going on the merit of that, I imagine some of the more current five star reviews are also fake.

i want my money back

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 7
Date: March 13, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I feel totally ripped off by this pathetic excuse for an expansion. Ubi, you won't be in business much longer if you don't get your act together.

Say goodbye to this once loyal customer, you lost me.

LOVE IT / HATE IT A.K.A. UBI LIES ABAIN!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 24
Date: September 28, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Having played every game in this series I see a few things from earlier games missing here. There is simply missing functionality, controls and ability to select uniforms, the ability to climb over small walls and boxes, etc...
Rogue Spear did several things much better than this game.

On the upside, this game is a LOT of fun even with all the bugs and the missing functionality. It's the best playing game of it's type with a real team atmosphere out there.

My last gripe is that Ubisoft promised to release the source code with this game which would have made for easy modding. They promised it and a year later it has not been released yet.

They promise the source code in December however so it's only fair to mention it. Then we can have some mods!

At least Athena Sword promises more photo-realistic graphics.

Buy Raven Shield used from Amazon and buy Athena Sword new from Amazon.

Well, surprise, surprise, UBI has delayed the release by over a month. The give no explanation or reason whatsoever. This is a very bad habit with them. Raven Shield was months late and now Athena Sword is months late. Why give a release date at all?

Amazon did have this game ranked as under 500th best seller on their site and I ask for what? For another broken promise by UBI.

Can we really expect the SDK in December? Will it be the first promise UBI keeps? I hope so.

I reduced my rating of this game to one star.

Edited October 16th, 2003

IM VERY UPSET

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 7
Date: March 13, 2004
Author: Amazon User

UBI for all the hype you spread on this expansion pack it was not worth the 30 I paid for it. The maps lag really bad. Just like the other people said before I get 30-70 FPS on maps but the maps from athena only get 10-15 max and that makes for very poor game play. About the only thing i say is nice from athena is the CTE game mode.

From a very upset loyal raven shield player my loyalty is wearing thin very thin.

Wasn't worth the money

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: March 12, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Some nice new features and everything. But for a Map Pack, these maps were horribly optimized. People with the best computers get 10 FPS with everything on low on alot of the maps. Good maps and nice layouts, but horrible horrible optimization.

Counter-strike still better

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 17
Date: January 16, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I've played ravenshield and boy was it fun!! NOT!!!!!! whole bunch of bugs and almost same stroyline as the first rainbowsix and that one was SENSATIONAL, but hey, a joke is never funny the second time, I spent more than 10 hours playing the first rainbow six and eagle watch(expansion one) this game? lets not go there. but I can say that I enjoyed multiplayer a little, but! I spent 39.99+tax to buy that game and guess what I played my 3 year old counter strike more! overall I can say that this game will have better graphic than CS:CZ but if you look at the bugs and lame storyline I recommend CS:CZ

Rainbow Six is in trouble

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: December 28, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I love the Rainbow Six Series. I'm in the military, have graduated from both Anti-Terror and Team Tactics schools. The Rainbow Six Series is an excellent series. The Tactics needed to play the game are almost identical to those used in real Close Quarters Combat scenarios.
That being said. WOW IS THIS ADD ON BUGGY! I played Raven Shield with no noticable problems, but when I added the Athena Sword Patch, all hell broke loose. Suddenly my computer began locking up, The sound would crash, and overall just a host of problems with the add on. My computer is used almost exclusively for gaming, and the Athena Sword patch was the only thing that had changed from when I played Raven Shield, so that is why I hold it responsible. I think Reading the reviews here supports my theory.
The maps looked very good, especialy for Online Play, but the glitches in the game became so frustrating that I have yet to play them all. Evidently you can download fixes, but if I have to patch a game more than once, just to make it work, then I have no interest in playing it. Skip this game and wait for the next one. Hopefully they'll get it right. I'm going to give them one more chance before I give up on UBI Soft.
I also didnt' appriciate them installing thier hokey website shortcut on and software on my computer. (Yes, I realize that it's easy to remove, and if I payed closer attention I could have prevented it from being installed, but come on.)
Rainbow Six Series is a great series, but I fear that it may go the way of Mech Warrior. Skip this game.

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