Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas

"Lost in translation"

Rainbow Six: Vegas was a highly enjoyable and critically acclaimed entry in the seminal tactical shooter series. It gave the Rainbow Six brand a much needed shot in the arm, after the dreadful Lockdown and Critical Hour games. While it was a major departure from the original series, tossing out the planning maps altogether, having a permanent set of teammates throughout the whole game and focusing more on shoot-outs, it wasn't a bad game. The PSP port, released to coincide with the PS3, is a very stripped down take on the game. It isn't necessarily bad, but a lot of other games do what it does a lot better.

Story:
The story of the PSP iteration runs alongside the story of it's bigger brothers. Playing as Brian, a field operative, and Shawn, a sniper, you work to eliminate the threat that encroaches Las Vegas. While you don't actually fight in Las Vegas much, what you do does aid the main team in their efforts. The plot starts off with you having to rescue two missing Rainbow operatives, and then the plot snowballs to include various international terrorists and a biological weapon. The plot is mildly interesting, thanks to the personality given to the two Rainbow operatives you play as, but other than that it feels pretty standard.
Score: 6/10

Graphics:
Visually speaking, Rainbow Six: Vegas is neither ugly, nor is it going to win any awards. Environments look like your standard first person shooter warehouses, complete with rooms filled with stacks and stacks of crates, barrels, and other industrial storage facilities. There are a few levels that actually aren't stock and boring, but the vast majority of the game is spent doing the same dungeon crawl that's been around since Doom. At least these industrial areas do a good job of looking fairly realistic. Character animation is stiff and awkward, and everybody's limbs resemble that of a Stretch Armstrong, resulting in hilariously bad cutscenes. What I do like is that the game implemented near full body awareness - you still can't see your legs, but I'm not going to be picky. You'll see your hand stretch out to turn on your nightvision goggles, open doors, operative machinery or pick locks. It's a very nice touch. One last thing to note is Vegas's relatively unstable frame rate. Everything seems to chug along at a reasonable clip, but when you throw in more than 2 enemies on screen the game's frame rate just plummets.
Score: 6/10

Sound:
Audio is Vegas's stronger suit. There's no real music to speak of, but there's a lot of well done voice acting. You'll hear an earful during mission briefings, and the two teammates will talk with each other, coordinating their actions, etc. Enemies will speak too, alerting you to their presences and their current situational awareness. Gunshots are particularly well done, as they always are in Tom Clancy games. Nothing is more exhilarating than hearing the crack of a sniper rifle. Everything else in terms of sound effects is pretty standard, and that's not bad at all.
Score: 7/10

Gameplay:
Vegas's gameplay retains a few choice elements from it's console and PC counterparts, but eschews a lot of it due to technical restrictions.

Before each mission you'll be able to equip both of your operatives. Brian can use a variety of assault rifles, sub machine guns and shotguns, while Shawn is shoehorned into using one of two sniper rifles available. Choosing wisely is important here, since you cannot restock ammo (or health for that matter) mid-mission, nor can you pick up enemy weapons like you can in the other versions of Vegas. This presents a problem when you play as Shawn. More often than not, Shawn is forced to fight in close quarters, which means you'll be relying on your pistol a lot.

Now, onto the actual missions themselves. As I mentioned earlier, you'll be playing as a pair of Rainbow operatives. Unlike the SOCOM games, where you were merely reduced to a 2 man squad but retained full squad functionality, Vegas's solution abandons squad play altogether. You'll usually start a mission playing as Brian, and play until Brian either needs Shawn's help, or when the game just decides to cut to Shawn, at which point you'll play until the game decides to switch again. You often won't see the other teammate onscreen with you, and they rarely actually work together at the same time, except when you're playing as Shawn and having to provide cover to Brian. What this boils down to is the game playing very much like a regular Rainbow Six game, except in Lone Wolf mode. This leads to the game being a lot harder than it should be, since you'll be facing down about 30-40 terrorists per mission on your own.

The odds are not completely stacked against you, however. You can take cover behind a variety of objects. When you do so, the game will switch to a third person perspective, and allow you to pick off enemies at your leisure. You can operative a snake camera, which allows you to tag and track enemy movement behind walls and other obstructions. This is very useful for planning your approach before entering a room, but, quite often, you will not be able to see many of the enemies with your snake camera due to the relatively small view radius.

Next of all is the actual combat. This game uses the same aiming system introduced in Coded Arms, and perfected in Medal of Honor: Heroes and Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror. You fire your weapon with R, and aim with the face buttons, leaving the extra buttons for the remaining functions. The actual aiming in the game is very sluggish, and there doesn't seem to be any way to adjust the sensitivity. However, when you aim with a scope, the sensitivity is off the charts and it's very difficult to line up a shot. You'll find yourself relying on the crutch that is the game's auto-aim. By holding L, you'll target any enemies near your crosshair, and by hitting Triangle you'll aim for their head, guaranteeing you a headshot about 60% of the time. You can manually aim down the sights of any weapon, but more often than not it's just easier to hit L and then Triangle.

The cover system is noteworthy in it's flaws as well. You can take cover with most objects by running into them for about 2 seconds. However, you'll find yourself accidentally running into objects or getting stuck and taking cover when you don't want to. Another fault is not being able to use any sort of manual aim with your weapons. This makes Shawn completely useless. He cannot snipe from behind cover, and a lot of times he'll come under the fire of enemies whilst trying to snipe them, and you won't be able to see your health bar while scoped in.

To aggravate things, the artificial intelligence exhibits some interesting properties. Several times, I was able to gun down an enemy in plain sight of his compatriots with a non-suppressed weapon, only to have them shrug it off. I've had enemies spot me, and then immediately forget I was ever there, or be able to see me when I'm sitting in their blind spot. A few times, the AI is actually responsive, but their stupidity kicks in way too often. To make up for it, they are fairly good shots.

With all of the problems listed above, none of them quite ruin the game as much as it's terribly unintuitive controls and boring mission design.

Rainbow Six: Vegas requires the same kind of dexterity afforded to champion Rubik's Cube solvers. Aside from the combat controls mentioned above, you also have a lot of context sensitive controls. The L button, when hit twice in quick succession, reloads your weapon. The Up button will activate your iron sights/scope or perform actions/open doors, and your Left button will activate the snake cam or your nightvision, etc. It's very clunky having to fumble around with the arrow buttons to do anything in this game. Not only are the default controls poor, but they're also unresponsive. A few times I've had to double-tap L at least 5 to 6 times before my weapon reloaded, as an example.

Lastly, there's the mission designs. A lot of times the game just plays out like a terrorist hunt scenario, although a few times you'll be escorting a lone hostage or activating some machinery or defusing some bombs. Several times in the game you'll have to cover your other teammate. This is implemented well a few times - you'll be given plenty of room to see the enemies you have to take care of, and one particularly cool but very short sequence has you in a helicopter as you take out enemies. However, a lot of times these sequences pop up unexpectedly, and you'll have to fight off a group of enemies that is usually very hard to spot and quickly take down. Combined with an inability to see your teammate's status, and you've got a frustrating situation of trial and error as you try to root out the last enemy before your teammate suddenly dies on you. Other things to note are enemy triggers. Often, enemies will not show up until you enter a certain spot on the map, at which point enemies will spawn out of thin air.

You'll be given 5 missions, all but a grand total of 1 which actually takes place in Las Vegas, and it's not even in a casino. Other mission locales include a terrorist-owned villa, a private airfield, a water treatment facility and a huge dam. It's very disappointing to know that, for a game that's set in Las Vegas, you don't spend any sort of time in any iconic Vegas landmarks - they'll only show up in CGI cutscenes that seem to be from the console games. Seeing a cutscene of the Strip in flames just makes me want to go out and grab the console version of Rainbow Six: Vegas instead of making me keep playing this.

In terms of longevity, Rainbow Six: Vegas's 5 mission campaign will last you about 6 to 7 hours. You'll spend a lot of it struggling with controls, and being forced to parts of missions over due to the random enemy spawns and the bipolar artificial intelligence. Thankfully, the game does include checkpoint saving, but since you cannot replenish ammo or health, if something catches you off guard, you'll probably have to restart the whole mission. Each time you complete a mission, you make it available for Terro Hunt and Mission Mode. Terro Hunt (short for Terrorist Hunt), which has been a Rainbow Six staple for as long as I can remember, basically tasks you with hunting and killing every terrorist in the map. Mission Mode simply lets you replay completed story missions. You can also unlock extras, based on the difficulty level you completed the missions on, and the overall rating you get once you finish missions. These extras are in the form of concept art, and I don't know about you, but I don't think jumping through lots of hoops is worthwhile for unlocking a few pictures.

Rainbow Six: Vegas packs ad-hoc and online infrastructure multiplayer, but it's restricted to 4 players and deathmatch and team deathmatch. The multiplayer community is basically dead, and it's prone to lag issues. It probably wouldn't be very fun anyway, considering the half-broken nature of the game.
Score: 6/10

Overall: This is one game that will not satisfy first person shooter fans or Rainbow Six fans. It's not bad, but it still needs a lot of work. If you're still not dissuaded, then rent it first before committing yourself to this game.

Summary:
Pros:
+ Storyline parallel to its big brother
+ Decent graphics and good audio
+ The campaign has a few highlights
Cons:
- ... but it needed a lot more
- The dual team mate mechanic is pretty stupid
- Dull mission design
- For a game taking place in Vegas, there's very little of the actual city shown
- Control issues
- Uninviting multiplayer

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 12/03/07

Game Release: Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas (US, 06/12/07)