Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas
It’s a lot cheaper than a flight to the real Vegas. Believe me, I checked.
Tags: Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas Categories: PS3 Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Michael Hanning on Aug 9th, 2007
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas (title page) | 1 | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Action | No | ||
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In the latest iteration of the Rainbow Six series you’ll be spending most of your time in Sin City itself, fighting your way through city streets and fancy casinos in standard checkpoint-to-checkpoint gameplay and blasting everything that moves. At least things look pretty – from the Law Vegas skyline as your helicopter shuttles you between missions to the expansive locales, this game looks simply marvelous. Now if only they’ll release the bonus missions where you have to sneak into a Siegfried and Roy show!
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Fortunately for America, most of the terrorists’ plot seems to center on taking over rooms and then standing around in them waiting for something to happen, or flipping cars over on the Vegas strip. This last part is the scariest in my mind, because the terrorists must be crazy strong to just knock those things over left and right like that. The new face of terror comes in the form of coyotes, slang for people hired to move illegal immigrants across the border from Mexico to the United States. I’ve got my own opinions on releasing this particular storyline while the US is still seemingly deadlocked on the immigration debate, but for the sake of fairness all I’ll say is that the timing made playing through the storyline really weird.
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The game’s great strength to me actually lay in the AI of both my teammates and the enemies. Opponents use the same cover you do and attempt flanking tactics, throw flashbangs and generally refuse to be cannon fodder just so you can look macho(er) while you machine gun them. Your teammates are also surprisingly capable, keeping to cover and never throwing themselves into the line of fire unnecessarily. I had a little bit of trouble getting used to commanding them, but I was easily able to leave them to, say, keep watch over a doorway while I snuck to a new position to launch an attack from two sides. It’s never as complicated as the old Rainbow Six games with the room they once had for intricate planning and flexibility for intricate planning, but this might just be the price you pay for a more action-driven experience.
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Ultimately, this is where I think the Rainbow Six franchise is starting to go wrong – the game played more as a straightforward action game than an exercise in military planning. There are still sections where you have your choice of tactics, and using your teammates intelligently is useful, but not necessary. You can easily make it through most areas by bursting into rooms and blasting the terrorists visible, taking cover and then fighting back each new wave with tactics straight out of Time Crisis – duck for cover, pop out and shoot, move to the next location. There’s even a point where you’re given nothing but a handgun and a long corridor of enemies – precisely the kind of Duke Nukem invincible hero machismo that the series originally stood in stark contrast to. Maybe it was the endless hordes of generic enemies that I blasted through without breaking a sweat, or how I could now use a shotgun in place of a sniper rifle, or just that pistol level, but I can’t help but feel that first person shooters are about to come full circle on a long track that nobody knew we were running.
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Of course, this might not be to everybody’s liking. Rainbow Six still stands out as a series that requires logic as much as a quick trigger finger, you’ve just come from doing differential calculus to regular long division. It’s a visual stunner that shows off the PS3’s goods like few other games have so far, and if you want a solid squad-based shooter it’s hard to go wrong with the premier franchise of the genre. Vegas is still a hell of a vacation spot.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
|
+ Gorgeous beyond belief + The AI for both allies and enemies is fantastic + I'll admit, fighting through massive casinos was pretty cool |
8.5 |
| What Doesn't | |
|
- The timing of this story is kind of weird, from a political perspective - Rainbow Six is veering more into traditional action game territory than military realism these days |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| It's more of a straightforward shooter, but it's still gorgeous and the best squad-based shooter for your money on the PS3. | |
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Tags: Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas
Posted by Michael Hanning on Aug 9th, 2007 and is filed under PS3 Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
