Since 1998, the Rainbow Six series has given us solid tactical shooters. For some unexplained reason the boys at Red Storm Entertainment decided to veer down the path traveled by most other shooters, when it should have stayed on the road less traveled. Lockdown should have been locked down and never allowed to leave the confines of Red Storm compound. If you're reading this review, you've probably played at least one of the games in the long running series, thus you know what to expect. If you don't, here's a quick update:

You play as the squad leader (Ding Chavez) of a four-man counterterrorist unit (which you can't switch between like before) called Rainbow. Before each of the game's 16 single player missions you're given a briefing where you get the specifics, a few detailed maps of the objective and an equipment load-out screen where you can equip your team. As usual, the array of weaponry is top notch and consists of numerous real-world choices. You'll be able to outfit each team member with a rifle, pistol, grenades (flash or frag) and an entry tool (hammers or breach charges). Each gun can be outfitted with one additional accessory, such as red-dot sights, scopes or high-capacity magazines.

Prior to Lockdown, weapon selection actually mattered. Here it's irrelevant because each one is extraordinarily accurate - even while on the run. Shots from close quarter combat rifles are pinpoint accurate, capable of nailing headshots with less than four inches of target showing from over a hundred yards away. What's worse, the "accuracy" problem reverses itself when you get up close and personal, and you're suddenly unable to hit the broadside of a barn door.

Storyline? You won't care much. It's as generic as they come. Evil terrorist organization [insert lame name here] has obtained [insert ludicrously named biological weapon of mass destruction here] in order to "terrorize" the world by [insert heinous act against the world here]. It's just one more "SpecForce vs. Terrorist" shooter in a genre that's been beat to death. In this case though, it's been beat with an ugly stick. What follows is a staggering list of what's wrong with Lockdown, because frankly there aren't many positives to highlight.

Let's start at the beginning, with installation. Any PC gamer worth his salt can tell you that pirating is a huge issue in the industry. However, the StarForce Software Protection tool used here is nothing short of a pain in the ass. What's more, StarForce leaves what some consider "malware" on your computer even after the game is uninstalled, causing other programs and games to function improperly.

The game box states that at minimum you'll need a Pentium 4, 1.5 Ghz with 512 gigs of RAM, and here's the funny part - a videocard with only 64 megs of RAM. There is no chance in a hell that the game will run on a machine like that. We ran it on a Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz with 1.5 gigabytes of RAM and a 256 meg GeForceFX 5950 Ultra and had to set it at the lowest resolution (800x600) with everything at medium. Even at those lowly settings, things were still laggy; bumping it up to 1024x768 made the game unplayable, turning it into a slide show.

The graphics are supposedly stunning, but they were only marginally adequate at the above stated resolution. Except at the outset of the Parliament map (M05). The rain effects of drops splashing off the screen were downright fantastic! Speaking of... one of the highlights of the game is the well-designed and diverse maps, which have special nuances that set them apart from each other. However, when you're skulking through a cave to avoid detection, and suddenly get "stuck" and are forced to exit the game... well, it kind of breaks the mood.

Along those same glitchy lines we found a bug that prevents you from firing immediately after opening a door, leaving you a sitting Rainbow duck. Furthermore, your teammate's reactions aren't quite as quick as you'd expect from a special ops unit. In fact, they toss grenades and move in such slow motion that it would cause the Wachowski Brothers (of The Matrix trilogy) to slip into a coma. Needless to say, this inability to expeditiously execute orders usually ends badly for you and your team.

It's one thing for a game to have horrific enemy A.I. - which Lockdown has in droves, but it's another thing entirely to have The Three Stooges as your teammates as well. In fact, the game's A.I. is so bad that going down to a carnival and plinking away at the moving targets in the shooting gallery with a pellet gun is more fun. The enemy utilizes no tactics, frequently using their bodies as bullet-seeking meat targets instead of actually needing to place an aimed shoot. Your squad mates are no better. These guys (and gals) are quite possibly the dumbest soldiers in the history of squad based gaming history. They're better suited blocking doors instead of breaching them; able to walk right past a tango without firing off a shot; or straying across your line of fire so you can score a "friendly fire" kill. In the end, you never really "need" your team, not just because they're more of a hindrance then help, but because everything in the game is dumber then a rock.

Finally, what the hell is with all the How William Shatner Changed the World - On the History Channel posters? We're not kidding when we say they're plastered everywhere! We literally lost count. Why terrorists would have these posters as the main centerpiece of their decorum is inconceivable. To be blunt, this degree of barefaced in-game advertising goes far beyond bad taste and into unqualified revenue whoring. It's the runny icing on an altogether bland and tasteless cake.

If you want to venture online you'll need to jump through several hoops to do so. First, you must enter another, different key code. And if you don't have an account on Ubi.com (Ubisoft's proprietary server that tracks your stats and rankings) you'll need to create one. More than a few times it took much longer then it should have to connect to the servers! Latency issues were also a problem, especially with ghosting (where an enemy simply vanished right before our eyes). All the standard R6 multiplayer modes like terrorist hunt, reverse terrorist hunt, and team-based games such as adversarial and retrieval are here. The highlight (not just of multiplayer, but the whole game) is cooperative play. This allows you to team up with three other real-life humans to play out all 16 single-player missions. This is a great workaround for the inept game A.I., but why should you be forced to use a workaround? It's almost like they don't want you to go online! And given the lack of people we found online, it's safe to say they're succeeding.