One of the first new things you’ll notice is the new visor. All your on-screen info is presented in a future-warrior-style HUD, and the visor has some nice glassy effects like water droplets when you look up outside when it’s raining, and condensation when you go indoors from the cold. But this, like a few bits of Lockdown is rendered a bit silly by the appearance of bullet holes when you get hit – not craze marks or trails where the bullets skidded off the bullet proof surface, but holes! Now call me pedantic but if I had bullet holes in my face mask I reckon I’d be dead, not just visually impaired – and to add insult to facial injury they’re always appear in the same place too...

The weapons as usual are a nice selection - machine guns, assault rifles, sniper weapons, silenced pistols - and you can select the kit for each team member before each mission (including what type of grenades they should carry). Grenade throwing is more accurate now as Ding has borrowed Sam Fisher’s aiming line – this doesn’t stop the squad from mis-throwing the occasional one when you tell them to “frag and clear” a room though, which usually kills everyone, and on one trouser-wettingly funny occasion I called for the squad to throw a grenade through a gaping door and was immediately killed by an errant phosphorous grenade… (At least I hope it was errant) Now if I didn’t know better I’d think all these new members of Rainbow were fed up with old Ding and wanted to replace him…

A decent set of multiplayer options allows for 1 or 2 players to play split screen, and obviously in multiplayer modes Lockdown plays better, as there are no dumb squad hassles to spoil things, and we get co-op play on the PS2 at last. There’s a bevy of multiplayer options including; instant action, custom game (team adversarial, rivalry, retrieval, co-op mission, co-op terrorist hunt, ‘my squad’, friends list, rankings etc. Lockdown plays well online, and has already been adopted by lots of clans. With decent voice comms and some nice, complex maps, it’s made for the job. When setting up online games the map selection is set to ‘random’ for some reason, which is a minor annoyance.

If this all ends up making Lockdown sound like a terrible game, then maybe it is in some respects (bad clipping, magically appearing enemies, severe AI problems and terrible acting and dialogue), but it’s fine in others (some very exciting shoot-outs and co-operative play) – it’s rather mixed up to say the least, almost like two separate teams worked on it, who had completely different visions for where the game needed to go. Well I think it needs to look back at Black Arrow and go back to its roots, because Lockdown is a new low point in the Rainbow franchise.