Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear is a tactical shooter, in which characters are affected by realistic factors and can be killed with a single bullet, thus promoting planning and tactics over force and firepower.
Rogue Spear is very similar to its predecessor,
Rainbow Six, and uses the same engine and gameplay, albeit greatly modified to feature improved graphics and animations, improved
artificial intelligence, and new mechanics such as
camouflage selection and the return of the hands-off "watch" mode from
Rainbow Six: Eagle Watch. The campaign features a total of 18 missions from locations around the world, while the multiplayer portion features 20 different maps.
Rogue Spear's basic gameplay remains mostly unchanged from
Rainbow Six, with the exception of the addition of a 'lean' mechanic, allowing players to peek around corners. The game follows a campaign of several missions, with objectives ranging from rescuing
hostages and
defusing bombs to gathering
intelligence and planting
surveillance devices; there are various approaches the player can take to complete said objectives, but
Rogue Spear takes an approach that promotes stealth, as enemies can now react to the player's presence if they are heard or seen, such as investigating the area, fleeing, or attacking hostages. Before each mission is a briefing that details the situation and advances the plot, and a planning stage where the player selects the Rainbow operatives they want for the operation (categorized into Assault, Demolitions, Electronics, Recon, and Sniper based on their skillsets), sets waypoints and orders for their color-coded teams on a map of the
area of operations, and equips their operatives with appropriate weapons, equipment, and uniforms for the mission. During the mission, the player can control the leader of any team at will, while teams not controlled by the player follow the orders assigned to them in planning. Injured operatives cannot be healed during a mission, while deceased operatives are
permanently gone for the rest of the campaign playthrough, forcing players to plan carefully to avoid casualties.
Rogue Spear features two free-play modes outside the campaign: Lone Wolf, where the player must complete an entire level using only a single operative; and Terrorist Hunt, where the player must defeat up to 30 terrorists in a level, with no other objectives aside from clearing the entire level of enemies.
Rogue Spear's
online multiplayer consists of two modes:
cooperative and
adversarial. Cooperative mode has players team up to complete missions against AI-controlled enemies in formats similar to the singleplayer missions, while adversarial mode pits players against one another in
deathmatch and
team deathmatch modes.
Rogue Spear does not support
dedicated servers, and games are limited to sixteen players per server. ==Plot==