The game is played from a third-person perspective, with the player giving basic commands to the rest of the team members in the squad. The game consists of various missions, each having to be completed prior to advancing to the next. If your character dies then you have failed the mission and you need to restart.

Rainbow Six 3 begins with a truly stunning movie sequence that has you on the edge of your seat with its fast pace and awesome visuals (there are some 12 minutes of movie-like footage in the game). It's a shame that this promise of something special is not carried over into the game itself, however. More on that later. Your first task on starting the game is to complete a set of tutorials that introduce the movement and controls for your own character and practice mission that will introduce the controls of your team.

Immediately you commence the tutorial you are struck by the limitations of the game. You only have the ability to stand or crouch. There is no fully prone position or crawl ability. You can both ascend and descend ladders; however, again unusually, there is no ability to jump. In trying to portray modern combat this limited set of control options leaves the player with few tactical options.

To control your team you can pull up a circular options menu that conforms to the controller movement pad and allows you to give some basic instructions to the rest of your team - such things as follow, cover, breach door and enter, breach door and biff in a grenade. These instructions apply to the whole team and not to individuals so you have to rely on them to sort out between themselves who does what. We found the AI's control of the team members somewhat frustrating as they tended to move in a clump rather than logically spreading out to cover a wider area. You can not designate one team member to cover the stairs, for instance, while others cover doors. It's largely pot luck how they position themselves and this certainly limits any tactical aspect of the game.

You can only determine the weapon load of your own character, while the rest of the team comes with pre-determined weapons and equipment. There is a good selection of weapons to choose from including a shotgun (for those wanting to make a statement) right through to heavy machine guns (30 weapons in all). Each has a satisfying feedback response to the controller and some reasonable sound effects during play. One omission, however, is a melee weapon. There is no knife or bashing weapon. Silent kills rely on silenced pistols rather than up-close-and-personal weapons.

Additional equipment includes frag grenades as well as flash bangs and night vision and heat detection kit. Before each mission you are given the option of selecting both the primary weapon and the secondary weapon for Chavez. However, with limited information available on the forthcoming mission this can be quite a challenge and often you will find yourself restarting a mission to get the right mix.

The mission briefings are scant at best. They are more of a background of the events leading up to the mission and very little on numbers, location and weapons of your opponents. A big let down for us was the lack of a mission map. You have no idea what you are up against and the likely position of the opponents you face. Good recon and pre-planning are some of the watchwords in modern anti-terrorism and it is hard to understand why they have not provided even a simple overview map of each mission so you can at least orientate yourself and determine the best course of action. Instead you are dropped at a predetermined position (no you can't chose where you insert) and then you are on your own. It's fortunate that the missions are largely linear in nature with few alternative routes as you'd likely be thrashing about all over the place looking for targets.

The missions themselves will see you fighting all over Europe, the Cayman Islands, Rio De Janeiro and as an exclusive for the Playstation 2, a mission in Italy as well. Unfortunately this variety of locations is not supported by the graphic engine. The graphics are quite bland and lack detail for a game released today. The sky feels more like a roof with little or no animation and the colours and details of buildings lacking a degree of sharpness you'd expect. Worse still, the colours of your targets seem very much at odds with their surroundings. They tend to stand out as if they were pasted in from somewhere else. Sure this makes target acquisition easier, however this lack of blending gives a very unnatural feel to some of the missions.

The game supports multiplayer (split screen), online play and voice activated commands. Unfortunately the multiplayer option although offering a different dimension to gameplay and going some way to make up for some of the game's shortcomings still does not lift the game far above being simply good rather than anything better.