Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six (Mac)

I consider rainbow six to be the first of the first-person tactical shooting genre. The idea of planning your mission out in depth before carrying it out is a new one, and red storm pulled it off. Many games have taken various elements of this game and recycled them. Half-Life: Counterstrike, and SWAT 3 are a few that come to mind.
You play as the team leader of an elite counter-terrorist organization known as rainbow six. You get called in to rescue hostages, take down terrorists, disarm bombs, download computer files covertly, and even deactivate a biological warfare device. As the game unfolds you slowly begin to understand the plot line more, and everything begins to make sense. This game is obviously based on the book rainbow six, (a great book) but i have read the book and there are some huge differences between the two. Many missions in the game didn't even take place in the book at all. Most of the plot is delivered via lots of text you have to read as well as some characters talking to you. Nevertheless, the plot is good and will keep you interested.
This isn't a game were you run in and blast everything. Accuracy and precision definately count here as one bullet can easily kill. You may not want to play the game on the most difficult setting, because the enemy AI becomes way to accurate as they fire at you. The game has 16 missions to play, 2 of which you are not allowed to fire upon anyone (stealth missions). The eagle watch mission back gives you an additional 5 missions if you choose to get it.
The mission planning is what sets this game apart from others. Before each mission you set waypoints for all 8 of the team members (in a max of 4 teams) and tell them exactly were to go and what to do. You can set go-codes so once your team gets to a certain point they will wait for you to tell them to proceed. You pick all your team members, the weapons, and the gear for them. Once everything is planned to your satisfaction you start the game and play as the team leader. You will often find yourself going back time after time after a failed mission and altering your plan. This is ok, its actually part of why this game is fun, but it can be annoying if the replanning is do to a glitch.
There are a few annoying glitches in this game. One is your team members will often get stuck in doorways or stairs as they get stuck on each other. Another bug is that sometimes if you are far away from a building you can see the people through the walls. These type of things can get annoying but you shouldn't avoid the game because of them.
Multiplayer is suprisingly good in this game. When you first start off in the rainbow six multiplayer world, you will find that many players are much better than you and will kill you off very quick. Once you get used the game a little you get better very quickly though. It will take a fair amount of strategy to be an effective player in most cases. You dont just run into a hallway guns blazing and expect to live long. Instead you might deploy a flashbang or fragmentation grenade then enter, or go around and suprise the enemy from another entrance. Multiplayer doesn't have all the planning that single player does. You can play in 2 modes: adversial or cooperative. In adversial it is either survival (everyone vs everyone) or team survival (gold vs blue). In cooperative you replay the single player missions except now you have other real people to play them with. Both modes are very fun and challanging.
Level design is solid. Buildings look real and the graphics are crisp and sharp. The the graphics aren't state of the art, but they still look very good considering this game is about 3 years old. You will probably need a 3d card to play this, although it is not abselutely necessary with a decent processor and good amount of ram.
I would recommend this game to anyone who has played a first person shooter and wished there was a bit more strategy involved. Some people dont like the sheer amount of planning that is involved in single player, but you can just go in the game without a plan at all if you so choose.