Rainbow Six: Vegas

Author: Ryan Garside
Published: 15th December 2006
Comments (18) Stumble

Campaign

After enjoying playing a few multiplayer rounds I decided to give the single player game another try. I was still annoyed by the lack of Vegas in the opening hours but did actually start to enjoy myself. The basic principle of each level is simple. You control two other special forces agents who will do anything you ask of them (well, not anything, you sick puppy). The game then usually presents you with scenario - say, for instance, a couple of bad guys in a room - and will offer you a few options for taking them out. Generally, this requires you to send your two guys to one door whilst you move to another entry point, use your snake cam to peak into the room and assign killing priorities (the guy on the right first, guy on the left second), then a button press later the attack is under way – all hell breaks loose and hopefully you come out on top.

This infiltrate and attack style gameplay makes up most of the game. Thankfully, though, it doesn’t get tired as quickly as you might expect. In some levels you’ll be blasting open doors or lobbing grenades through windows and in others you’ll find yourself rappelling down sides of buildings, making use of smoke grenades and flash bangs and generally just mixing it up.

The counter-attack sections of the game can be particularly fun. In one instance - I believe after we had rescued the hostage in the Calypo Casino - the bad guys counter-attacked with devastating affect. Bad guys smashed through windows and barged through doors, hurling bullets and grenades by the dozen in our general direction. In the panic of the situation, the moment I need my comrades the most, however, they didn’t cut the mustard.

Rainbow Six: Vegas Was Elvis a terrorist? Rainbow Six: Vegas Was Elvis a terrorist?
Rainbow Six: Vegas Was Elvis a terrorist? Rainbow Six: Vegas Was Elvis a terrorist?
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Squad Mates

You see, your two squad mates don’t like to be too far apart. You can’t send one off in one direction and the other in the other. This can be really annoying, especially when you accidentally send them both straight into a storm of bullets. Fortunately, if your guys die you can bring them back to life by hitting them with the patented Rainbow Six Elixir of health, a Pulp Fiction-esque syringe that when jabbed into their dying bodies will bring them back to life. Surely they should develop this technology for real life battles?

Life regeneration is also applicable to you. In the same way the Call of Duty 2 and Gears of War work, your character will regain health by just avoiding being hit. In combination with the cover mode, it is generally not too hard avoiding death (unless of course you get a grenade shoved up your bottom). If you do die the game uses checkpoints rather than quicksaves to reload you. This isn’t too bad but can lead to you watching the same little picture in picture mission briefing over and over. One little bug I did notice when playing was that sometimes when I clicked continue playing, after loading up, it would actually start me in the checkpoint before the one I had actually finished.

The game allows you to customise your own soldier in practically any way you like. You can change your clothes, your equipment, your weapons and even your face. I explored the ‘put your own face on your character’ technology in depth in our preview so won’t go over that here again. Needless to say it’s a pleasant feature that doesn’t add a huge amount to the game.

Personalising your soldier is something Ubisoft Montreal wants you to do. It is for this reason that I struggle to see why the weapons are so, well, samey. Sure there are loads of different weapons, as well as ammunition caches dotted throughout the maps to allow changes on the fly, but do they really offer a huge amount of variation? The short answer is no. One machine gun feels like another and the only discernable difference is between the shotgun, rifle and pistol. Overall the combat works; you can go silenced with most weapons but don’t expect to have huge amounts of variety in the way the shootouts unfold.

Rainbow Six: Vegas Was Elvis a terrorist? Rainbow Six: Vegas Was Elvis a terrorist?
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Complaints

One thing that really annoyed me was the way enemies reacted when shot. I’ve never actually seen someone being shot in the face, so can only use movies and my imagination to work out what would happen. However, if I shot someone in the face with a massive sniper rifle I don’t think they would just fall over limply like an overweight drunkard on a night out. Unfortunately, the use of physics is fairly limited in the game and there is no comparison with Half Life 2 or Far Cry in the physics department here.

I also think Rainbow Six Vegas would benefit from some more dynamic environments. It would be great to be able to use the environment to my advantage a bit more. I want to be able to duck behind a wall then blind fire into my opponents cover to disintegrate it so that he has to run out. At times I was crying out for a bit more interactivity.

Oh sure, there is some level of teamplay here, but gone is the tactical planning. You can effectively take any weapon into any situation. Setting your team mates up to attack is a cool feature, but you don’t really have to use it. If they just bundle in after you, generally you have enough firepower to overwhelm your enemies. That’s not to say the game is easy - it’s certainly not and at stages can be frustratingly hard - but the feel, the realism factor, has been taken away from the Rainbow Six games.

All in all, though, the game is good fun and is certainly worth a play if you’re a shooter fan. It’s a big step up from the recent Rainbow Six releases (I thought that the franchise would be ended after their poor performances). If you’re going to invest in one shooter then go for Gears of War, but if you need something else then definitely give Vegas a look.

Rainbow Six Vegas is currently available on the Xbox 360 priced at £37.99 on Play. As of today it's also available on the PC, you can pick it up for £24.99 on Play.

Rainbow Six: Vegas Was Elvis a terrorist?

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