Raven Shield: Success is in the Details
You wiped out the alien Covenant army menacing humanity in Halo: Combat Evolved. You laughed while saving the world in No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.’s Way. You sought out new life forms and fired your phaser at them in Star Trek: Elite Force 2.
Look Before You Leap
While Raven Shield allows you to see the action through a character’s eyes as you carry out the 15 missions in the game, as any first-person shooter does, it requires more planning than most FPS titles. You select up to eight operatives, who all sport specific specialties, and break them into no more than three teams. Equip them with your choice of 57 weapons, gear such as night vision goggles or explosives and body armor (heavier is better, but it also slows them down). Then decide your strategy.
In the mission planning screen, you examine a map and determine how to execute your mission. You might want your teams to fire at will or you might decide it would be better for them to fire only if shot at, depending on the circumstances. You can also set waypoints where your operatives will stop and wait for further orders from you or perform a specific action, such as toss grenades in a room.
During each mission, you move between the teams and take control of different characters, or you can choose to be an omniscient observer and tell the teams what to do while the computer executes the action. If you’d prefer to skip the preparation stage, you can always load a plan created by the game’s designers, but it may not fit your particular style.
Raven Shield’s missions take you around the world as you try to figure out why the employees at a Croatian bank were killed. They had discovered documents that proved the Nazis were shipping ill-gotten gold out of the country as World War II came to an end, but it’s clear that something else is going on. Even though the documents were burned, Rainbow believes there is more evidence to be found, if you can stay one step ahead of the bad guys.
Put Your ISP Account to Good Use
Like other first-person shooters, Raven Shield also offers plenty of multi-player action, both adversarial and cooperative, via GameRanger. On the adversarial side, take on other players in the usual solo and team-based deathmatches or try to complete an objective, such as moving hostages to a safe zone while the other team tries to stop you.
If you’d prefer to cooperate with your fellow gamers, you can team up with them against computer-controlled tangos in a variety of missions, as well as the usual kill-or-be-killed modes. When you set up a multi-player server, you can tweak such settings as which weapons can be used or the time limit per round.
Now if you’ll excuse us, we have a penthouse to sneak into.
Stay Frosty. Direct your team into this bank and free the hostages quickly.
Clear the Room! You better get in there fast if you want to avoid civilian casualties.
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System Requirements:
 | Mac OS X version 10.2.6 or higher |
| 733MHz PowerPC G3 processor or higher |
| 256MB of RAM or higher |
| 1.9GB of hard disk space |
| 32MB 3D graphics card (minimum of ATI Radeon or NVIDIA GeForce 2 series) |
If you liked these games, check out:
Halo: Combat Evolved Medal of Honor: Allied Assault Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon World War II Online
