Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas

"The best Rainbow Six yet"

The Rainbow Six series is well known as one of the forerunners of tactical, one-hit, one-kill shooters. Rainbow Six Vegas is the latest member of the series, and shakes up the formula a bit while still keeping the same general concept behind the game.

A small note before I continue: This is a single-player only review. Vegas's multiplayer doesn't count towards the rating either way.

Vegas puts you inside the body of Logan Keller, a newly appointed squad leader within Team Rainbow - the world's finest anti-terrorist group. The game starts out in Mexico in a prologue that sets the stage, but quickly moves to its primary location: Las Vegas. Throughout the campaign, you'll be taking part in standard anti-terror operations: hostage rescue, bomb defusing, information gathering, and simple "kill the bad guys".

To accomplish this, you lead a squad consisting of two other men. You have a command system that's basically a cleaned-up version of that in previous Rainbow Six games. You can order your men to follow you, or you can have them go to move to a specific place. Your two comrades move as a pack - there's no way to order them two different places, but between the two of them and the one of you, you can do quite a bit of flanking of the bad guys. If there's cover near their destination, your team will get behind it. This doesn't always work very well, however, since you usually end up with one guy behind cover while the other simply stands out in the open. Needless to say, this can get annoying, so you need to be really careful about where you tell your team to go. Fortunately, your teammates are made of some very strong stuff. If they get killed, you have a roughly 30-second window to get over to them and give them a shot. If you reach them in time, they'll happily pop back on their feet without a single injury. If you don't get to them in time, it's game over for everyone. This makes the game much more forgiving, since you don't have to worry about losing your entire team for the rest of the level just because of a single stupid mistake.

To provide even more options, your friends have two rules of engagement - infiltration and assault. Infiltration is a quitter, stealthier mode. Your teammates will put silencers on their guns, and will only fire at bad guys if they're fired upon themselves. Assault is just what it sounds like - no silencers, and they shoot as soon as they see something to shoot at. The team is one of the best aspects of Vegas, allowing you to perform all types of strategies and out think the bad guys.

The team becomes especially useful at doorways. Whenever you run across a door, you can have your underlings "stack up" at the doorway and perform a number of different actions, depending on their current rules of engagement and whether the door is open or closed. This adds quite a bit of strategy to the game, since each option has its use at a specific time. If there's a hostage by the doorway, you can't chuck a frag grenade inside - that would kill him. Instead, you should choose a flashbang grenade, which will stun, but not kill, everyone else in the room. These decisions come up extremely often in the game, and make very tense situations. No matter which option you select, the final step of the process is the clearing of the room. Usually, this is a good thing, as your teammates will kill all the bad guys for you. When clearing, though, your teammates have a very limited understanding of cover, and will simply stand out in the open and get slaughtered if the terrorists have cover. In those situations, its up to you to pull your teammates out or they'll get killed. While this does force you to think a bit more strategically, your teammates' lack of AI does get fairly annoying, as you start to feel like your commanding a group of 6-year-olds that happen to be good with guns and grenades.

On a more personal level, there are a number of changes to your character. In a break from the typical Clancy realism, Vegas features a regenerating health system a la Gears of War. If you get shot, your screen starts to blacken. If you manage to get behind cover, your health will slowly return to normal, and you'll be good to go. If you keep getting shot, though, you die, and there's no "magical injection" that revives you like it does your teammates. This system makes the game much less frustrating, since you no longer have to worry about a single injury crippling you for the rest of the level. You can afford to stick your head into danger every once in a while, since you'll be fine if get behind cover when you're shot.

On that note, Vegas's biggest change from previous Rainbow Six games is its cover system. Using the left trigger, you can now use nearly anything as cover from enemy gunfire. How safe you are behind cover depends on the cover itself - a low wall, for example, will usually leave your head susceptible to being shot, but a tall pillar will likely protect you completely. From behind cover, you can lean out and shoot at the bad guys, then quickly pop back behind the cover to avoid their counterattack. The cover system works great, and it fixes my main complaint with the previous games. In a one-hit, one-kill type game, you need to do your best to avoid getting hit at all. The cover system actually allows you to get some protection, and makes the game much less of a trial and error game. Instead of having to memorize where the bad guys are, you actually have a chance of beating them without dying.

Unfortunately, the cover system does have a few problems. The system for leaning in and out of cover is a bit wacky, and you'll often find yourself going in the opposite direction of where you want. When attaching to the cover itself, you'll often find yourself attaching to the wrong piece of cover (say, the wall behind you), putting you in some very tricky situations.

The staple of any FPS are its weapons, and Vegas offers a wide selection to choose from. There are a number of different guns of many different types (submachine guns, sniper rifles, shotguns, machine guns, pistols, and assault rifles) that you can use. You get to select which gun you want at various points throughout the game (called "outfitting stations"), and you can also pick up the guns dropped by your opponents. There are also a number of explosives for your to choose from, ranging from frag grenades for killing to smoke grenades for hiding. Every guns has its own strengths and weaknesses, and they're all fun to use.

Unfortunately, Vegas's main flaw is in its save system. It uses checkpoints - locations where your game saves automatically. The checkpoints are somewhat common and are a definite improvement over the previous games, but still leave quite a bit to be desired. There are sometimes very large gaps between checkpoints, and you usually find yourself facing a really hard situation right before you get another one. As a result, you often have to deal with a fairly simple room before you move on to the hard one. Since you'll likely die a lot in the hard one, you'll be reverting to your checkpoint quite often, and will be forced to redo the easy part again, which gets very, very repetitive. With the new health system, though, checkpoints aren't nearly as important as they would normally be, meaning this problem doesn't pop up constantly. It's annoying, but not game-wrecking.

Rainbow Six Vegas is a great game. Though it has some flaws, it has done wonders to fix many of the problems that existed in previous games in the series. If you're a fan of tactical shooters like the other Rainbow Sixes or Ghost Recon, there's a high chance that you'll love this one, and I highly recommend you get it. If you haven't tried a tactical shooter before, though, I recommend you rent it instead. The slower, one-shot, one-kill gameplay is quite different from the standard first person shooter gameplay, and you won't necessarily like it. If you tried the other Rainbow Six games before and did not like them, I recommend that you rent this and give it a chance. The new health system makes the game much more stress free, and could very easily fix the problems you had with the other ones.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 01/05/07