History YMMV / RainbowSix

** And, of course, the ''VideoGame/PoliceQuest: SWAT'' series, though few people realize this because the [[VideoGame/SWAT3 noticeably more popular third game]] in that series switched to ''Rainbow Six''-like first-person gameplay to [[FollowTheLeader follow its lead]].

** There's this entire plot about a girl kidnapped to be a test subject on Shiva. She briefly accesses a phone, and while drugged, calls her mother. The books spends pages following two cops of the NYPD who investigate her disappearance. They realize something big is happening but their investigation goes nowhere, and the entire plot thread basically ends with absolutely nothing. The only contribution to the actual plots the cops bring is that when Popov decides to spill the beans to Clark, they recognize one of the names he give as one of their suspects, and that's one more point of the pile of evidence that bolsters Clark's willingness to believe Popov.

** Shielded enemies in the ''Vegas'' games are a pain. Besides being very hard to get a bead on, they're almost always armed with [[HandCannon Raging Bull revolvers]], which can deplete your health frighteningly quickly.

* HarsherInHindsight: The console versions of ''Rainbow Six 3'' involves an US intervention in Venezuela after numerous false flag terrorist attacks against US interests in the country, which ultimately leads to the assassination of the President of Venezuela by RAINBOW. Throughout the 2010's, Venezuela under President Nicolas Maduro was mired by political violence, accumulating into US sanctions and an unsuccessful coup attempt in 2019 by the American backed political opposition.

* NightmareFuel: The ''Vegas'' games are rife with this thanks to being based around a terrorist attack of unprecedented scale on the Las Vegas strip. The second game also has you briefly hearing an undercover operative being tortured to death, and [[spoiler:[[YouAreTooLate failing]] to stop a chemical bomb from going off and killing an entire gymnasium's worth of civilians. ''While hearing them pounding on the doors and screaming before it fades''.]]

** The fundamental concept originated with Ariolasoft's forgotten ''They Stole a Million'', a heist game from 1986 in which the player carried out a series of robberies, first selecting team members and then planning their movements with the aid of stolen blueprints before acting them out in real time. With the exception of gunplay, the concept and many of the details were identical.

*** First game: [[TheRevolutionWillNotBeCivilized Irena Morales]] is a revolutionary Mexican terrorist leader already infamous for blowing up the French embassy and for smuggling in Americans to execute on camera. Working for [[spoiler:[[BigBad Gabriel "Gabe" Nowak]]]] on his plan to take down Rainbow Six, Irena kidnaps Gabe and Akahashi to hold them captive. Taking over Las Vegas on [[spoiler:Gabe's]] orders, Irena causes countless deaths through her actions, such as blowing up buildings, and threatening citizens with a micro-pulse bomb, which contains a virus that causes peoples' skin to burn off. Causing all that destruction as a distraction for Rainbow Six, Irena plans to blow up the Nevada Dam and launch a micro-pulse missile.

** Rather than outright kill all of the Horizon executives, or arrest them and risk losing the case because there wasn't enough explicit evidence, John decides to dump them straight into the jungle, stripped naked of all clothing and gear, and let them "reconnect with nature" the hard way. They're tracked by heat signature from satellite imagery to keep an eye on them, and while [[NothingIsScarier we never find out quite what happens]], none of them make it out alive. It's supposed to be LaserGuidedKarma, but comes off as a bit excessive of personal justice for some people.

** Multiple chapters are spent building up the ecoterrorist's American headquarters, and highlighting all the things that would make it a very tough nut to crack. It's played up as the Kilimanjaro of forced entry scenarios, a hostage taker's wet dream. And then the ecoterrorists abandon the facility and flee to a smaller outpost in the jungle. Which they then leave, in order to engage in a jungle shootout with a team made up of the deadliest special forces operators in the world, which [[LampshadeHanging even the protagonists]] recognize as a painfully lopsided scenario. Though it's also entirely in-character for Horizon: for all their nightmarishly brilliant research, they're straight up too caught up in their own perceived moral superiority to realize when they became blinded by their own hubris, and despite having all the info available, they didn't bother realizing how badly the scales were weighed against them once Rainbow was on their tail, all this on top of their impulsive panic at the mere idea of even being targeted.

* NightmareFuel: The test subjects picked up by Horizon for human experiments with their modified strain of Ebola, first homeless men, then sufficiently isolated people seduced in various ways, who are infected, drugged into compliant and, in the case of the second batch, sexually-open states of mind to test transmission methods, and ultimately murdered in the case of those who survive until the late stages of infection. The story goes to great lengths to show how isolated they were, and their gradual and painful decay into simple statistics that the researchers, the occasional pang of conscience that doesn't actually drive them to do anything different. After they all die, that's that; only their worried families, if they have them, will even know they were missing, and only Popov ever really finds out by accident (which helps decide his HeelFaceTurn).

** Multiple chapters are spent building up the ecoterrorist's American headquarters, and highlighting all the things that would make it a very tough nut to crack. It's played up as the Kilimanjaro of forced entry scenarios, a hostage taker's wet dream. And then the ecoterrorists abandon the facility and flee to a smaller outpost in the jungle. Which they then leave, in order to engage in a jungle shootout with a team made up of the deadliest special forces operators in the world, which [[LampshadeHanging even the protagonists]] recognize as a painfully lopsided scenario.

** At one point, Carol and the head of Greenpeace discuss several plans to fix environmental problems easily using technology, like filling jets full of ozone and flying them over the South Pole to plug the ozone layer, or dumping iron filings en-masse in the Indian Ocean to promote plant growth and fix global warming, and then tell each other they're terrible ideas because they represent further human meddling with nature. Clancy probably intends this to be his rebuttal to the environmentalists, suggesting they're just ideological fanatics who don't actually care about fixing the problems they rail against would be simple, but they don't want to do it if it's not done in a way that fits with their view of the world. The problem is, ''all'' of these suggestions ''do'' sound like poorly-thought out [[ZanyScheme bar-napkin-sketch ideas]] with huge potential to backfire, go horribly wrong, or at ''best'' just plain not work, and the environmentalists ''do'' seem perfectly justified in rolling their eyes at them. While trying to discredit them, Clancy has accidentally proven their point, that people like him have a distorted view of both the scope of the problem and the ease of the solution.

** At one point, Carol and the head of Greenpeace discuss several plans to fix environmental problems easily using technology, like filling jets full of ozone and flying them over the South Pole to clean the ozone layer, or dumping iron filings en-masse in the Indian Ocean to promote plant growth and fix global warming, and then tell each other they're terrible ideas because they represent further human meddling with nature. Clancy probably intends this to be his rebuttal to the environmentalists, suggesting they're just ideological fanatics who don't actually care about fixing the problems they rail against if it's not done in a way that fits with their view of the world. The problem is, ''all'' of these suggestions ''do'' sound like poorly-thought out [[ZanyScheme bar-napkin-sketch ideas]] with huge potential to backfire, go horribly wrong, or at ''best'' just plain not work, and the environmentalists ''do'' seem perfectly justified in rolling their eyes at them. While trying to discredit them, Clancy has accidentally proven their point, that people like him have a distorted view of both the scope of the problem and the ease of the solution.

* StrawmanHasAPoint: For all that he presents them as unsympathetic, monomaniacal hypocrites, Clancy's unwillingness to have even a single remotely sympathetic character express any understanding or concern at all for any the villain's views, even the mild maybe-we-shouldn't-turn-the-Earth-into-an-uninhabitable-wasteland-in-the-name-of-short-term-profits ones rather than their kill-humans-to-prevent-ecological-apocalypse ones, actually backs up their point that they aren't being taken seriously, and that they need to take drastic action to get something done because if they don't no one has any interest in listening to them.

** The TakeCover mechanic itself ranges from "the player/AI is nigh untouchable" to "most of your entire upper body is exposed because the character stuck to it at a weird position or the cover is kind of glitchy". And Logan or Bishop both have a really, ''really'' clunky set of animations from trying to lean around it to shoot or throw grenades, leaving nearly your entire body exposed in the process. Since blind fire is near-useless outside of point blank situations, taking aim without someone distracting a target is liable to get you killed before you can fire a shot off sometimes.

* WhatAnIdiot: [[spoiler: Gabriel Nowak]], the BigBad of the ''Vegas'' series, went to extensive and excessive lengths to exact vengeance upon Rainbow and the United States by association, causing a terror attack on Las Vegas that would easily be [[InferredHolocaust the most devastating terrorist strike in national history]] if this happened in real life (though this is a [[CrapsackWorld drop in the bucket]] for the Clancyverse). Except not only does he put himself into direct danger and potential discovery multiple times just to personally screw over Bishop, but he engages in BondVillainStupidity and never bothers trying to directly kill them until the very end. Even worse, his entire motivation (enough to try to sell Rainbow team's personal info and ''national classified secrets'' to the highest bidder) all stem from [[spoiler: nearly getting kicked off of Rainbow for being a trigger-happy rookie that almost ruined an entire operation, endangered hostages, and got a negotiator killed. While [[UnwittingInstigatorOfDoom Bishop]] could be criticized for defending him, by any realistic military standard the dumbass would've been removed from Rainbow at best, and dishonorably discharged from the military altogether at worst.]] Killing as many people as he can with a ChronicBackstabbingDisorder, gassing an entire auditorium of innocents, and trying to bomb several places in the city (and ''succeeding'' in at least one case along with destroying an oil refinery) are all apparently fair game to get petty payback for his own severe fuck-up, not to mention [[spoiler: targeting the ''only person that stood up for him out of some mad, paranoid ramblings of being manipulated'']].

** Another problem with the ''Vegas'' games is the sheer number of enemy spawn triggers the moment you cross an invisible line. Acceptable in something like ''VideoGame/GearsOfWar'' because of the damage you can take and cover rarely ever being far, not so acceptable in a game where a head graze is instant death and only a couple bullets on Normal kill nearly as fast, combined with enemies being able to shoot you the moment you're spotted and a bad habit of enemies spawning right around your next cover's corner. Thankfully your teammates can also be used to trigger these, but that means throwing them into the firing line which can risk them being downed or outright killed.

* FridgeLogic: How in the bloody hell did Gabriel ''not'' get booted out of Rainbow after his [[LeroyJenkins trigger-happy stupidity]] in the opening mission of ''Vegas 2'' got a negotiator killed and alerted all the terrorists? In the books, an accidental discharge of a handgun was met with ''immediate'' expulsion from the organization, yet it's implied that [[PlayerCharacter Bishop]] took their role as a mentor too seriously and stood up for him. [[spoiler:All this ends up doing is giving him the opportunity to try to sabotage and kill everyone from within Rainbow; at least if he was kicked out for his screw up he wouldn't have had anywhere near as many resources from a lack of information to sell.]]

* HarsherInHindsight:
** The horrifying Worldpark attack where 10 Marxist terrorists take 35 children hostage is pretty much a counter-terrorist's worst-case nightmare scenario. In 2004, 6 years after the book was published, an even worse incident happened in real life when over 30 Islamic terrorists attacked an elementary school in Beslan, Russia, and took over '''300''' children hostage. In the novel, the terrorists murder one of the children before Rainbow is able to defeat them. In real life, over '''half''' the children held hostage at Beslan died in the shootout that ensued after a 2-day siege.
** The plot to decimate the human race via Shiva relies upon two stages: first, a mass outbreak at the Olympic Games, then, insidiously, a false vaccination that actually infects huge numbers of people with the virus. This not only conjures up the kinds of anti-medical conspiracy theories that have hurt attempts at vaccination throughout the history of immunity therapy, but probably wouldn't work in TheNewTens where herd immunity is constantly threatened by juuuust enough of the population rejecting modern medicine and refusing to vaccinate.
** The book has, for lack of a better term, a very early [="90s"=] view of terrorists. Terrorists mostly just take hostages and make demands, allowing for a team of heroes to come in and save the day. In a post 9/11 world, this makes the book seem rather hilariously out of date. There's no mention of Islamic Terrorism in the entire book. Terrorists who only seek to cause as much death and mayhem as possible only exist in the form of the final villains. Many of the books' more evil terrorist frankly look tame compared to some of the actual terrorists the world has seen in the 2000s and 2010s.

* HarsherInHindsight: The original game had one of its terrorist organizations -- a right-wing anti-immigrant group no less -- motivated by their opposition to "the integration of the United Kingdom into the European Union." Cue 2016, where the United Kingdom held a successful and very controversial vote to ''leave'' the European Union.
** The "Vegas" games feel especially uncomfortable following the 2017 Las Vegas Strip shooting. The terrorist's plot also parallels the 2008 Mumbai attacks and the 2015 Paris attacks to an unsettling degree.
** The story of "Patriots", especially if you live in a country where domestic terrorists have conducted successful terrorist attacks. Or look at modern US politics how close the country is teetering on the tip of full blown civil war.

* MagnificentBastard: Popov, for setting things up so that if the terrorists he sponsors get defeated, he keeps the money he would have paid them. Also, at the end, he backstabs his Horizon backers and spills the beans on them to Rainbow, [[KarmaHoudini earning himself a full pardon]]. Then he uses his money to buy up the ranch of one of the deceased Horizon executives since he knows that the land there is rich in gold, as its previous owner was concerned about the environmental impact of mining operations and wouldn't pounce on the opportunity.

* NightmareFuel: The test subjects picked up by Horizon for human experiments with their modified strain of Ebola, first homeless men, then sufficiently isolated people seduced in various ways, who are infected, drugged into compliant and, in the case of the second batch, sexually-open states of mind to test transmission methods, and ultimately murdered in the case of those who survive until the late stages of infection. The story goes to great lengths to show how isolated they were, and their gradual and painful decay into simple statistics that the researchers, the occasional pang of conscience that doesn't actually drive them to do anything different. After they all die, that's that; only their worried families, if they have them, will even know she was missing, and only Popov ever really finds out by accident (which helps decide his HeelFaceTurn).

* WhatAnIdiot: [[spoiler: Gabriel Nowak]], the BigBad of the ''Vegas'' series, went to extensive and excessive lengths to exact vengeance upon Rainbow and the United States by association, causing a terror attack on Las Vegas that would easily be the most devastating terrorist strike in national history if this happened in real life (though this is a [[CrapsackWorld drop in the bucket]] for the Clancyverse). Except not only does he put himself into direct danger and potential discovery multiple times just to personally screw over Bishop, but he engages in BondVillainStupidity and never bothers trying to directly kill them until the very end. Even worse, his entire motivation (enough to try to sell Rainbow team's personal info and ''national classified secrets'' to the highest bidder) all stem from [[spoiler: nearly getting kicked off of Rainbow for being a trigger-happy rookie that almost ruined an entire operation, endangered hostages, and got a negotiator killed. While [[UnwittingInstigatorOfDoom Bishop]] could be criticized for defending him, by any realistic military standard the dumbass would've been removed from Rainbow at best, and dishonorably discharged from the military altogether at worst.]] Killing as many people as he can with a ChronicBackstabbingDisorder, gassing an entire auditorium of innocents, and trying to bomb several places in the city (and ''succeeding'' in at least one case along with destroying an oil refinery) are all apparently fair game to get petty payback for his own severe fuck-up, not to mention [[spoiler: targeting the ''only person that stood up for him out of some mad, paranoid ramblings of being manipulated'']].

* ScrappyMechanic: For some reason, Vegas series doesn't have subtitles, which is very frustrating because the large bulk of the plot is delivered via exposition during gameplay-including in a heavy gunfight, and most characters either speak with thick accents or talk over radio.

* ScrappyMechanic: The fact that the Vegas series strangely doesn't have subtitles when the large bulk of the plot is delivered during gameplay including in a heavy gunfight, and most characters have thick accent.

** The book has, for lack of a better term, a very early [="90s"=] view of terrorists. Terrorists mostly just take hostages and make demands, allowing for a team of heroes to come in and save the day. In a post 9/11 world, this makes the book seem rather hilariously out of date. There's no mention of Islamic Terrorism in the entire book. Terrorists who only seek to cause as much death and mayhem as possible only exist in the form of the villains. Many of the books' more evil terrorist frankly look tame compared to some of the actual terrorists the world has seen in the 2000s and 2010s.