
	Platform Playstation 3 Genre Shooter Publisher Ubisoft Developer Ubisoft Montreal ESRB M (Mature) Released July 2007

- Excellent tactical combat "simulator" - Superb simulation of weapons and engagement

- Most arenas are rather pigeon-holed - Game can be reduced to a crawl at times (prepare to spend a lot of time sitting) - Enemy AI can be downright simple

Review: Rainbow Six Vegas (360) Review: Resistance: Fall of Man (PS3) Review: Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 (360)
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Rainbow Six Vegas

Score 9.0 / 10

The Rainbow Six series has added a dimension of realism to the first-person shooter genre, and the latest addition Vegas is no different. You take control of an assault team leader through a campaign of missions against terrorism. Instead of the locales being the typical hot-spots of the world, you’re going to be fighting on your home turf, soldier.

Besides your tactical expertise, superior firepower, equipment, and tactics will have to serve as your equalizers against superior numbers. Every mission you will spend as much time eliminating enemies as you will balancing firepower against stockpiling weapons. The “spray-and-pray” method of aggressor control fails in this game, as you’ll need those bullets for future enemies. Judicious use of cover

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will be the only way to neutralize terrorists without succumbing to high velocity lead poisoning.

Vegas handles the use of cover in quite a ingenious manner. Once you choose your cover and put your back to it, the camera switches to a 3^rd person view where you see the on-coming fire. As you move around behind the cover, you can dodge the heavy fire and once

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you approach the edge the camera switches back to 1^st person. If the enemy’s fire is a little too much to contain, you can just fire aimlessly in the direction of the opposition. You might get lucky and drop a guy, but it might just make someone back off enough for you to make a magnificent move (assuming of course that you actually had one besides the always amusing bum-rush technique).

Damage sustained in the game is somewhat realistic – enemies succumb to a well placed cluster, but your own invulnerability is a bit hard to believe at times. Understandably, the game would be over pretty quick if you dropped from a single shot, but last time I checked, the modern combat armor wasn’t rated to take as many as 17 rounds of AK-47 fire before succumbing. This damage can be recovered if you can find a spot to hole-up. Despite the advantage for yourself, the likelihood of your dying is still quite high – this game can be quite tough even on normal mode. To compensate for this, Vegas employs a checkpoint save system which you can restart at if you bite it – you will reset with whatever weapons, ammo, and equipment that you had at this point. The frequency of these checkpoints is pretty forgiving so you won’t lose too much progress if you make a mistake.

The environments are pretty darn realistic, albeit a tad pigeonholed. I found most levels to be a bit narrow. Although there is some room to maneuver, the chokepoints defeat this purpose. You end up with this freedom that is completely removed from your hands due to a limited number of ways to pass these points. In open areas, the turtle-plan quickly becomes the preferred method of approach – find cover, thin the ranks, and eliminate stragglers then proceed to next group of enemies (lather, rinse, repeat). In enclosed spaces, you get a number of different tricks to employ: explosives, disorientation w/flash-bangs, or dynamic entries using rappelling lines.

The single player campaign is not the longest, but the multiplayer features add a fat blubbery layer to the game.

The co-op modes make for some fun diversion – especially when you get to coordinate with allies using some interesting weapon combinations. My personal favorite has got to be the Riot Shield with the Desert Eagle – you can mow down the enemies and provide mobile cover for your squad. With all the weapon choices, you’ll quickly start to find combinations that work (or fail horribly). I quickly learned that I prefer to carry submachine guns over assault weapons – although I’m not crazy about the reduced power, I like having enough ammo that I can afford to fire off a few rounds to make someone uncomfortable. I easily doubled up the amount of time that I played this game on the multiplayer modes and will probably spend most of my time in the future here.

All in all, Rainbow Six Vegas is an excellent tactical simulator, one that does provide some good replay in forcing you to play at near perfection (on the highest difficulty) and with some patience in order to succeed. Definitely recommended for the serious gamer looking for a challenge.

- Tazman

(August 2, 2007)

“Oh it’s hot… but you just know that fighter plane/dinosaur was molested”

– Foxxy (Drawn Together)