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The Rainbow Six series is ready to hit mainstream. Along with other Tom Clancy mates Ghost Recon and Splinter Cell, Rainbow Six is one of Ubisoft’s key franchises. But while Splinter Cell reached mass acclaim, the other two series were relegated to the hardcore crowd. Vegas does for Rainbow Six what Advanced Warfighter did for Ghost Recon: hit the masses. The game reinvigorates the franchise and is one of the must-play games for the PC this holiday season.
The story in Vegas borrows liberally from Advanced Warfighter. The game even begins in Mexico. In Vegas, you play as Rainbow leader Logan Keller who has to stop terrorists from taking over the casinos and Vegas. They plan on killing millions of people and it’s up to you to stop them. The story, in itself, isn’t bad but the game ends with a cliffhanger ending that is just begging for a sequel.
Vegas uses an extensive cover system for its action, which makes combat all that more interesting because you simply cannot rely on your automatic gun and quick reflexes to lead you to safety. In the game, you’ll be moving from the backs of cars, slot machines and anything else you can find to survive. When you’re behind cover, you have the ability to peak and shoot at your enemies. Otherwise, you can still shoot without aiming although this is obviously less accurate than aiming your shot. While you usually play the game in a first-person perspective, the game shifts to a third-person perspective when you take cover. The transition is seamless.
You always have two other members if Team Rainbow with you during the game. The AI of your computer-controlled partners is remarkable since they’re very effective at taking cover. It’s very easy to issue commands such as walk here, clear rooms, walk behind you, hold place, and just about anything else that you can imagine. You won’t lose should one of them die since you can revive them with a serum if you get to them fast enough. Like other modern shooters, the game does away with the health bar in place of an interactive health system. As you take damage, your vision gets progressively worse. If you let it get too bad, you die.
Where Vegas succeeds the most is immersing you in the gameplay. You truly feel like you’re playing as an elite agent. Ubisoft has heavily hyped the fact that you can fly in a helicopter, rope your way down, rappel down the side of a building and bust through a window. While it seems like this would be abused, it is just as fun every time you do it. The game is challenging and exciting in the default difficulty mode, but things get even more hectic in the realistic difficulty setting. You are forced to use cover more and you can take considerably less shots before dying. It’s quite a challenge even for experienced players—and yes, even those who beat Gears of War in insane. The weapons in the game include the typical sniper rifle, assault rifles, shotguns and submachine guns, but you have access to prototype weapons as well as current weapons.
Vegas has an extensive multiplayer mode. The multiplayer mode gives you a character to play with and customize by unlocking accessories, armor and weapons, giving you incentive to continue playing the game online. The game supports competitive multiplayer modes for up to 16 players. These include the typical deathmatch and capture-the-flag modes which feature respawns, as well as others that do not. The game lets you play the singleplayer campaign cooperatively with up to three other players online, which makes taking on the realistic mode more feasible. Vegas also includes a terrorist hunt co-op mode in which you hunt down terrorists which are generated in random places. Be warned that the retail version of the game contains a bug that crashes the game if you search for games using the default settings. To avoid this, you have to search with some parameters.
Rainbow Six Vegas is one of the most visually impressive games currently available. The game engine, itself, is a modified version of Ghost Record Advanced Warfighter, which still looks great in the post Gears of War era. While everything in the game looks amazing, the character models steal the show. They are painstakingly detailed and move around realistically. If you take a close look you can see all of the gear that they have on them which is a sight to see. The environments—from Mexico City to Las Vegas’ (fictional) casinos—are equally impressive. One of the most impressive things, actually, is how you get from one location to the next. You’ll fly in a helicopter and get a bird’s eye view of the city which is simply superb.
The audio is equally impressive. The soundtrack sounds epic and makes the game sound like a major motion picture. The voice acting quality is decent but the dialogue is fairly humorous (intentional or not) but nonetheless fits right in with the game’s realistic tone. Be warned, though, that the game is rated Mature for a reason. The sound effects, especially the gun effects, round off the stunning package. The guns sound great and the explosions do to.
Rainbow Six Vegas is one of the best games available this holiday season. If you’re a fan of the franchise, genre, or good games, you owe it to yourself to pick this game up. The gameplay mechanics are refined to the point of perfection and the presentation is stellar. The only real difference between this version and the Xbox 360 is the aforementioned multiplayer bug—which you can work around and we expect Ubisoft to fix in the near future. -- Jose Liz, PGNx Media
---- Jan 3, 2007
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