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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.

Miles too easy

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 6 / 8
Date: April 29, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Yes I a big fan of the Rainbow 6 series, so I waited in anticipation to play this game. Well I was able to complete it in less than one day the 8 new missions, that was to have my team wiped out once or twice and then completing the level without so much as a scratch. Graphics, Sounds were fantastic, but this add on is miles to easy. Folks save your money and forget this offering.

Hmmm.....

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 8 / 13
Date: July 10, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Raven Shield is a great game, to say the least. This expansion pack sounds great, if you do multiplayer levels. If you don't, then it's $30 for an 8 level campaign (plus 3 classic missions). If you do alot of multiplayer gaming, there's 8 new levels and 5 new modes, and seven more weapons (it's definately worth it for that).

It will also feature more realistic weapon noise (the Matrix sound effects team helped out on this one).

If you're wondering about the campaign, it's a continuation of the game's. The objective is to wipe out Gospic's organization, from it's roots. (There's missions in Croatia, Italy, and Greece)

I give this a pre-release four stars becasue of the fact it only has 8 missions, and a relatively uncreative campaign. I would expect the missions themselves to be challenging, but many people wanted the campaign to feature current events. Maybe next time. But I can't complain too much- Raven Shield is a great game with excellent graphics, detail, and control. If you haven't bought it yet order both Raven Shield and this pack!!!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Buggy with No Support

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 5 / 9
Date: February 26, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Raven Shield is fun. Dealing with all the bugs, lies and crappy patches is not. This expansion is too expensive and promises no bug fixes. I am waiting for about two weeks after the release to buy or not. I suggest you do the same.
I have played since the demo and Ubi has the worse support you could ever imagine. We had 3 months of silence from them. They then released a patch to include a wallhack. They company is terrible and they release patches that add bugs, without fixing them. Theres terrible trigger lag which they simply gave a cosmetic fix too. Sometime your gun fires 1-2 seconds after you push the trigger.
Wait and See!!

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.

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