Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas

"Solid Tactical Shooter with easy controls and good weapon selection"

Graphics: Graphics are typical next-gen quality. Nice textures, lots of neon lights, they did a perfect job of creating the feel and atmosphere of the dimly-lit casinos (but strangely high-contrast due to the neon lights) on the strip. I ran in to a few small graphical hitches that didn't affect gameplay. In a few cases the geometry and lighting would load correctly at the start of a mission, but the textures would not. This fixed itself within a minute or so of listening to a mission briefing via the HUD and starting into the level. There was no slowdown in the game, and muzzle flashes and grenade effects were solid. After shooting a window, when you move your gun barrel into the window, it will take off the few remaining shards of glass, which was a really nice touch. Animations were solid, reloads looked realistic as if the guns have some real weight to them.

Sound: The sound quality in this game was top-notch. Each of the fairly large variety of weapons has distinct firing sounds, that feel like they are punching their targets with the ferocity of their real life counterparts. Grenades, flashbangs, and breaching charges all sound great, and the proximity sound alteration (the firing of weapons on the other side of a wall is audible but muffled, for example) is also high quality.

The disappointing thing about sound also discouraged the gameplay. The only thing tipping you off to a grenade landing under your feet is an enemy yelling "Take THIS!" before throwing. Unfortunately, because you and your two squad mates are typically on opposite sides of a large room, there's no telling if they threw the grenade at you, or your squad. In either case you unfortunately have to abandon cover and run to avoid an untimely death. In the heat of combat, though, it's very easy to miss the terrorist's precursory yell. A simple "tink tink tink" of metal hitting some marble floor would have been enough to let players know a grenade just landedat their feet.

The voice acting is great, with the exception of Logan, the main character. His southern accent leaves a little to be expected, but it's still a pretty solid job.

I'm really glad they didn't skimp on sound, as it helped player immersion quite a bit.

Gameplay: The tactical situations presented in the game made it much more than a standard fps. By coordinating most of your teammates movements into a single button (A), it made setups for infiltration or assault extremely easy. The cover mechanic was excellent, and definitely one of the best I've used. While not realistic in that a half inch of plywood will protect you from .50 caliber sniper bullets, being able to blind fire and lean out of cover in any direction is definitely cool. By holding LT you duck into cover, and then if you press left, right, or up on the thumbstick you will peek out of cover and ready your weapon. It also doesn't move the camera when your character turns around to duck behind cover, which allows you to mark enemies, plan your shots, and pop out and head-shot them before they know what hit them.

The game's difficulty curve was more of a roller coaster. I would find some of the missions exceedingly easy, and some almost frustrating to the point of destroying a controller. Due to the nature of the room-to-room combat, stealth in this game, while available, is essentially impossible. The moment a door opens, most enemies in the room know exactly where you are. The fact that most enemies can see and fire on you with one pixel of visibility from a notch in between some rails made some of the rooms insanely difficult. The computer nearly always saw me before I saw them. This resulted in some uncanny headshots, some extremely unfair situations (despite planning and multiple entry points), and a lot of reloads. And since stealth isn't an issue, don't bother with silencers, as they serve no purpose other than to reduce your damage by a fairly large amount.

The wild difficulty curve is compounded by the save game system. This game uses a checkpoint system, solely based on plot development and clearing rooms to a specific point on the map. Unfortunately the game has varying lengths of gameplay between these checkpoints. In the earlier missions I would find myself clearing enormous swathes of the level between checkpoints, and clearing singular rooms between checkpoints in the later levels. The most frustrating part of this game is clearing a huge chunk of a level, only to be one-shotted right before a checkpoint by the one guy your teammates didn't manage to get, resulting in your having to replay through the entire huge chunk again.

Story: The story is fairly standard Tom Clancy, political intrigue mixed with some action. Terrorists are attacking Las Vegas for an unknown reason, and the character conjecture on this throughout the story helps to push the plot forward. You're sent in to stop the terrorists and prevent their vile schemes. All three of you. Against several hundred terrorists. Where are all the cops and SWAT members? I see their cars in the road, but they're nowhere to be found. There's enough story there to keep you going, but it's nothing to really write home about.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 07/07/08

Game Release: Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas (US, 11/20/06)