Graphics: If there’s one thing Eagle Watch is, it’s pretty. The real-world environments really are spectacular, from the light streaming through the long windows of Big Ben’s bell tower to the exotic architecture of the Taj Mahal and Forbidden City. One other big plus is the “Device Picker” located on the Eagle Watch CD, which allows the player to select the video card used for the game. As someone with a Riva TNT, I was always annoyed that Rainbow Six would always default to my 3Dfx card instead of letting me choose. Fortunately, that is no longer an issue.

One slight gripe about the graphics: I wish the designers had taken the time to make some new hostage models. Wasn’t that hostage in the Forbidden City actually the drug lord I rubbed out way back in one of Rainbow Six’s early missions? (see screenshot)

Interface: Basically, Eagle Watch features the same control interface as Rainbow Six, and as such is excellent: the keyboard is configurable; damage and stress are very realistically modelled; and the “plan” interface proves to be a very effective tool in laying out your assaults, once you figure out how to use it properly.

What irks me about Eagle Watch, though, is that the designers did nothing to address one of the biggest complaints about the game, and that is the player’s inability to directly control any member of his or her team. The player controls the leader of any given team, but cannot switch to other team members unless the leader is killed. What a pain this can be during the course of the game. For example, during the Big Ben mission, the operative I was controlling ran out of flash bangs (grenades that stun and do not kill), and I really needed some to proceed. Well, I couldn’t simply tell the guy behind me to throw one, or take control of him and throw one myself. Instead, I had to take direct control of the leader of another team (who happened to be on another part of the map), bring him to my location, and then use him to throw one of the flash bangs he had left. Talk about tedious.

Thankfully, the designers of Eagle Watch had the presence of mind to implement a small yet incredibly useful feature into the mission pack: at the end of each mission briefing, it tells you whether or not the combat environment has been surrounded by remote sensors, therefore eliminating the need for you to take a heartbeat sensor along. This was something Rainbow Six failed to do, and it was such an annoyance to take up a valuable inventory spot with a heartbeat sensor, only to learn that the whole map was wired with sensors anyway.

Gameplay: Central to the entire expansion pack is the theme of having missions based in historic buildings — tourist locations, really. If I were an architect I’d probably be very impressed with the levels; hey, it is pretty cool to stand in Big Ben’s dusty bell tower or having a running gun battle in the Senate chamber — I’m not disputing that. But the mission design itself is pretty weak when you look at what the designers could have done. With only five missions to play with, you’d think there would at least be some variety, but that’s really not the case. All five find your Rainbow team rescuing hostages, with the final mission throwing in a bomb disarmament for good measure. Why not an assassination, or a straight-out brawl with the M16s — both of which were featured in Rainbow Six? Even worse is the fact that the environments prove to be way too small, and the missions way too easy. I decided to use the default plan in the Forbidden City, and the mission was over in approximately three minutes. It was get in; waste the terrorists; and then get out. No fuss, no muss…no fun.

Also included in Eagle Six are three new weapons, the .50 Desert Eagle pistol, Heckler & Koch G36K assault rifle, and the G3A3 assault rifle (which, it would seem, is the closest players are going to come to having a sniper rifle in their inventory). Making their debut in the game are also four new Rainbow team members, characters who made Clancy’s book so memorable: Homer Johnston, Louis Louiselle, Eddie Price, and Dieter Weber. Therein lies another problem with Eagle Watch: it attempts to appease fans of the novel by including those characters in the game, but really only succeeds in adding more generic team members because the characters from the novel are reduced to common soldiers. For example, in Clancy’s novel, Dieter Weber and Homer Johnston are both snipers; they each have their specific M.O. and choice of weapon (Homer prefers a bolt-action rifle while Dieter relies on a more modern, auto-loading gun), but their chosen profession is clear. The expansion does nothing to preserve this, however. Sure, in the game their weapons skills are awesome, but they’re not snipers. Why not? You mean to tell me with locations like a space shuttle launch pad and the Forbidden City, the designers couldn’t have set up sniper-specific scenarios? Sorry, I don’t buy it.

Sound FX: Maybe I’ve become spoiled by Thief: The Dark Project’s great sound effects and digitized speech, but Eagle Watch just seemed to disappoint me, mainly because of the silence of the terrorists. I mean, you bark out orders to your team members, and they respond with their status reports. Why do the game’s enemies have to seem like such lifeless automatons? Why couldn’t the enemies call out to each other for help, or even exchange greetings to each other? To me, this absence makes a very realistic game seem entirely unrealistic.

Still, as a whole the sound effects are very cool, and Eagle Watch does add some cool ambient effects, like the squawking of birds in the Taj Mahal level and the squeaking of bats up in Big Ben’s clock tower.

Musical Score: I really can do nothing here except carry over the score from the Rainbow Six review, as Eagle Watch uses the same, tense music. Unfortunately, it also offers the same annoyance: the inability to control the music volume independently of the sound effects volume.

Intelligence & Difficulty: The biggest gripe I had with Rainbow Six was that the computer-controlled allies just didn’t seem all that smart, and really didn’t prove to be all that helpful. Unfortunately, Eagle Watch does nothing to correct this. Your team members are just as brain dead as they were in the original game (with the exception being the slight advancements made by the post-release patch, which Eagle Watch automatically installs): Other operatives in your team can do nothing but fire upon any enemies they may see, and attempt to always keep up with you, meaning they’ll constantly move toward you no matter what direction you may be facing. One can’t even imagine how incredibly annoying this is unless the effect is experienced firsthand. The problem comes when you as team leader need to turn around, particularly in tight corners; your team members will continue to move into you, meaning you’ve basically got to “push” them out of the way if you want to get by. They also never “check their six” for terrorists who may be behind them, and I lost more operatives this way than I care to remember.

I also found the mission pack as a whole to be entirely too easy to complete, thanks in large part to the inattentiveness of the enemies. It got to the point where I could shoot a terrorist, and his comrade standing right next to him would do nothing to react…except fall down dead when I blasted the oblivious moron right in the skull with my rifle. The bad guys in Rainbow Six just seemed so much more on the ball, and I knew if I screwed up I’d be dealing with a detonated bomb or dead hostage. This just never proved to be true in Eagle Watch.

Overall: When the smoke has cleared and the dizzying effects of the flash bangs have abated, what you’ll find is a pretty skimpy expansion pack, and one that doesn’t improve upon any of the parent game’s shortcomings. Rainbow Six was too short to begin with, and Eagle Watch just pours salt in the wound by offering only five new single-player missions. Sure, the new multiplayer options are cool, as are the two new training scenarios, but let’s face it: without a solid single-player component, a game add-on is a mere shadow of what it could have been. Such is the case with Eagle Watch, a mission pack that, in the end, offers very little bang for the buck.