Title Rainbow Six Vegas Date 06.30.2007 Genre Tactical FPS Platform PlayStation 3 Developer Ubisoft Publisher Ubisoft

Tom Clancy games have been popular in their own rights since 1998. Since Ubisoft presented us with tactical shooters, we can now experience how tactical shooters should be done, and Rainbow Six Vegas doesn't show any signs of weakness.

Prepare for entry

You are Logan Keller, directing a three-man squad, and stopping terrorists from blowing up Las Vegas. Now, you might ask yourself,” There has to be more than that.”, and there is, but that's not until the end of the game. At the end of the game though, there is a cliff hanger that may not immerse you in the story to get the next game, but it's the game play itself that will make you get the next game.

Rainbow Six Vegas’ game play has changed a lot. There's no planning, no briefings full of text, and no better way to play tactical shooter, in my opinion. This game has a lot of new features, and most of these features will help you make tactical decisions. Now you have a tagging feature that allows you to tag two terrorists, and you give the order and your teammate will kill the terrorists in the order you tagged them in. This comes very helpfully when you're trying to clear a room in 5 seconds, without hurting a hostage. If you let a hostage die, its game over and you'll have to restart at one of the plentiful check points the game provides. To help you clear a room, without hurting a hostage, you'll have a snake cam to peek underneath doors. You can tag people from there too. After you figured out how you'll clear the room, you should be able to succeed.

The biggest new feature in this game, though, is the cover system. You push the right mouse button, and your view will change to a third-person perspective, and you can peek around corners, lean out and take some well targeted shots, or blind fire. This works well in this game, and I can't wait to see how much they can improve it in the next game though it might be hard, because this cover system works almost flawlessly. You'll also, be able to repel off of buildings and from there, you'll be able to breach in through a window. You'll be able to hang upside down, off a sky scraper, which actually sounds kind of frightening if you ask me, and take some hot shots through a window.

Another great thing about this game is that the AI is smarter. The enemies make good use of there cover just as well as you do. They will even flank you when you're not paying attention. The Ai in this game is also very aggressive, so to help you, you'll have two squad mates that are very smart as well. They don't get stuck into walls, they'll watch each others back, and commanding them is easy. You just point at an area, and push the space bar, and then they'll set up cleverly. I had no problems commanding them what so ever. The game has bit of a trial and error feel, though, because the enemies spawn in the same place, but the AI is so well done, that when you're in battle, the enemies will, almost never, do the same thing twice.

All these new additions for the single player are great, with the helicopter extractions, the ability to strategically barge into a room after another, and what makes, most of all, into a tactical shooter, is that you have to take everything a step at a time. You can't run around guns blazing and think you'll succeed. That's the beauty of the game's campaign.

The single player is good, but what will keep you coming back, is its multiplayer. Even in multiplayer, you have to be tactical, especially in team survival, where two teams are up against each other, with no re-spawns. This is my favorite mode, but there are also others that are really good too, like, team sharp shooter, coop story, and coop terrorist hunt.

In team survival, you have to be an experienced player to be able to be good at this mode. You have to be just as tactical in this mode as if you were in a single player mode. You'll be packing not only the guns you like, but also flash bangs, smoke grenades, and also tear gas grenades, if the server will let you use those. Team sharp shooter is fun too, but it doesn't have quite as that intense feeling as team survival does. That's because you can re-spawn after you die, but this is a good training session for new comers, because team survival can be tough if you can't think on how you'll survive when you know they're enemies surrounding you.

Coop story allows you to play the entire story with up to four players just as well as coop terrorist hunt where you hunt down the terrorists in a map. These modes will train you on how to work as team, because this comes in very handy in the competitive multiplayer modes. The coop mode can be desired at times, because of the lack of VOIP. Most of the time, coop feels like “shoot whatever's in your path, who isn't your ally, and don't die”, the “don't die” can be hard at times, because it's easier to work as a team with VOIP rather than talking. It's pretty hard to communicate with your teammates when you're under an intense fire fight. Coop isn't as fun as it should be, but it still is fun.

During my experience, and the fact I have the lack of experience with previous games, I was actually one of the worst players. People would pop out of nowhere and get a one shot kill on me, but the overall experience in multiplayer is fun. I found my self playing hours of Adversarial Team matches, and I couldn't pull myself away. The competitive multiplayer matches are fun, though, and people will probably play this until the next game comes out.

The big down side, though, are the frequent crashes in this game. Sometimes, I'll be playing matches, and have a good time, until the crash comes up, and then I have to restart my computer. This can detract from the replay value, because, it feels like it takes forever to login to your account. At the time of this writing, there are not a lot of servers in the PC version. This game is still fantastic in its multiplayer, and I had no problems finding a match and creating my own.

Las Vegas shines brightly in this game, with destructible environments and glowing cities. This game looks fantastic, the character models look human, signs glitter up, and you'll be able to visit lots of good looking, fictional casinos. There are some washed out textures in this game, but you'll see that the game really shines in graphics. This is Las Vegas we're talking about, so why not make it look good.

The game also sounds great, with some gritty dialogue and superb sound effects. The gun fire is very clear sounding, and the voice acting is pretty good too. You'll also here the slot machines make their weird ringing noise, which is a nice affect. You'll hear terrorists talking to each other, or if you unexpectedly interrupted their cozy conversation, they'll shout curse words at each other and at you. Most of it can be offensive, but that's why the voice volume control is there.

Enemy neutralized

In the end, Rainbow Six Vegas is a must own for long time fans of the series. Though, the few bugs and crashes can bring this game sown quite a bit, but if you're just looking for a really good shooter, then you should check this out regardless if you're a tactical shooter fan or not.

Game Score

A-

Reviewed By: Contributed