Once again, you'll take the role of Ding Chavez and lead a Rainbow squad into battle.
Like other recent Rainbow Six games for consoles, Critical Hour has you in the role of Ding Chavez, commander of a four-man team of elite commandoes tasked with taking down terrorists in highly sensitive missions. The brief, seven-mission campaign draws upon missions from some of the original Rainbow Six games on the PC and takes you across the world performing tasks that range from infiltrating a domestic bioweapons lab in Idaho, to rescuing a hostage on a container ship just off the coast of England. You also undertake the usual tasks of eliminating terrorists, defusing bombs, and protecting civilians. The campaign doesn't last long, and experienced Rainbow players can blow through it in just a few hours.
The interface in the game seems to have been drawn directly from the last original Rainbow game on consoles, Lockdown. You have indicators for your health and the health of your teammates, as well as an ammo and grenade counter. You can also issue simple orders to your team--such as to move forward, to follow, and to open a door--by using context-sensitive button commands or by using voice commands with a mic. The voice commands work well enough, but for some reason, the options available to you through either method are more limited than in previous games, which gives the game a more simplified feel.
There isn't much tactical preparation to the missions. Before starting a level, you can choose the loadout for your operatives and for yourself from a rather limited list of primary weapons, sidearms, and secondary gear types. Once you're in the mission, the movement and weapon feel give Critical Hour an arcadelike flavor, exacerbated by a tactical map that shows you the position and movement of all enemies in neighboring rooms. Aside from the enemies that occasionally burst into your area to attack you, there are never any surprises in store for you behind closed doors. The gameplay is compromised even further by flash grenades that are often ineffectual--it seems as though flashbangs don't stun enemies unless you can toss them close to your enemies' position. Considering how limp the explosions look, it's not surprising that grenades don't have much effect on enemies. The low-quality presentation extends beyond grenade explosions to the texture quality and character model detail, or lack thereof. There aren't even any cutscenes in between or before the missions to set the scene. Everything in the game looks fuzzy and indistinct, and while the voice quality and quantity are about on par with recent Rainbow Six games, the gun sounds are totally underwhelming.
