Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas - Review
Added June 19th, 2007 by Jason Stafford
Las Vegas, Nevada. Home of the some of the most extravagant casinos, dazzling shows, and a never-ending nightlife. In the fifth installment of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six series, Vegas is also home to a group of terrorists bent on destruction. It's up to elite counter-terrorist unit Team Rainbow to repress them.
Rainbow Six: Vegas puts you in the rubber sole molded combat boots of Logan Keller, Team Leader for Rainbow. The campaign mode's levels are divided into chapters. Each chapter consists of a number of individual areas within the overall location, with varying objectives that will need to be completed. Though it may seem peculiar at first, Rainbow Six: Vegas in fact begins in Mexico, with Rainbow hot on the heels of international terrorist and general ne'er-do-well Irena Morales. Much of the opening portion of Mexico is, in fact, a rather large training mission, and offers up a great variety of the game-play that will be seen throughout the rest of the game, but at a pace that feels very natural and fluid. You'll get a chance to rappel, use a fast-rope, climb up or slide down ladders, engage in intense firefights, and frequently take cover.
As a tactical first-person shooter, Rainbow Six: Vegas creates a strong sense of needing to act quickly and precisely to adapt to the situations at hand. Vegas continues the tradition of having an invisible amount of health that will slowly replenish as you avoid injury. Instead of a visible health-bar, or some other archaic form of knowing how close to death you are, your vision worsens as you succumb to more trauma. As damage accrues, the screen becomes red and increasingly blurred. When you're almost dead, the entire screen turns to a fuzzy black and white, where even the closest of objects is practically indiscernible. This adds a strong sense of urgency, partly because your sight can become so poor that seeing a safe escape route becomes difficult, if not impossible.
On the game's Normal difficulty, you can sustain quite a number of hits before you are put down. On Realistic difficulty, one false move can and will prove to be instantly fatal. That's not to say that Normal is a cake-walk. One bullet to the head - or a grenade thrown between the feet - can be enough to take you out. Often, you'll find yourself suppressed and outnumbered by terrorists armed just as well as you are. This all helps to gear the Normal difficulty away from being a mere run-'n'-gun affair, and provides one of the more core elements of Rainbow Six: Vegas. There are plenty of check-points that autosave your progress throughout the campaign, so you never feel as if you'll have to repeat a large enough chunk to warrant being frustrated, merely a little perturbed.
While fighting the assault-rifle toting, Kevlar-armored baddies, you'll quickly find that parked cars, slot-machines on the casino floors, and even potted-plants or dumpsters are your second best friends. Running up to just about any object and holding the left-trigger will put your back against the object in a covered position, with the camera pulled out to a third-person perspective. Cover is one of the primary tactics used in Rainbow Six: Vegas, whether it's solo play or against up to fifteen others in the adversarial modes. While behind cover, the camera can be moved to survey over the short wall, or what's down the hallway. This allows you to set up your next move, whether it's to throw a grenade or lean up or out from cover to shoot at someone, or to merely hold down the right-trigger button to lay down blind-fire. While this is highly inaccurate, it is extremely useful in that it keeps you well-covered. Though you have a reticle in the single-player, the cover system is so superbly implemented that it becomes second nature to line your shots up perfectly, which is great practice for popping out against human opponents online.
Thankfully, you'll have plenty of firepower, so you won't just feel like a sitting duck behind that wall. Rainbow Six: Vegas gives you a number of options, from submachine guns, assault rifles, light machine guns, sniper rifles (which, in true FPS fashion, are useless in single-player, but excellent in skilled hands online), shotguns, and pistols for firearms to a riot shield, as well as explosives such as fragmentation, smoke and incendiary grenades, flashbangs, and breaching charges. Online, you'll also get the chance to try your hand at some gadgets and other goodies to annoy your opponents, such as tear gas, which blurs vision, a radar jamming device, and motion-sensor.
You'll also have access to infrared-vision and night-vision goggles at any time to help you hunt down all these evil-doers. While the fish-eyed perspective of the infrared is great, its visibility range is fairly limited, and helpful only in close-quarters. Infrared's primary purpose, however, is that it can be used to see through the veil of a smoke grenade, which comes quite in handy. The night-vision, on the other hand, is fairly worthless. Most areas are lit well enough that you don't need the aid. On the rare occasion that you might, the night-vision merely saturates everything in a dull, listless green, rather than giving any impression of light amplification. The visible distance is regretfully laughable with night-vision as well, making long-range battles in the very few areas where you actually cannot see without one of the types of vision impossible, outside of a lucky shot shooting in the direction the enemies' bullets are coming from.
Though you can pick up weapons and ammunition from enemy troops, you unfortunately are unable to strip them of any grenades, despite their ability to throw seemingly limitless amounts. Though it's obviously for game balance, it bears being mentioned. You'll be able to change equipment between chapter areas, or in equipment caches that you'll occasionally stumble across in levels, so you won't be relegated entirely to enemy equipment.
While you'll need to be flexible to the ever-changing battlefield, your team of two that accompanies you through the campaign unfortunately leaves much to be desired, from a tactically-stringent standpoint. Your commands are fairly unimpressive, running the gamut from toggling between "follow" and "hold" with down on the D-pad, to "move there" with a mere push of the A button. You can also alter the ROE (Rules of Engagement) for your team between Infiltrate and Assault, which changes the way they engage enemy units between "shoot when shot at" and "shoot on contact," respectively, and also changes the options available when in position next to a door.
With your team stacked-up, you can have them frag and clear, open and clear, flash and clear, breach and clear, or smoke and clear, depending on their current ROE. Each of the three options available in the current ROE are given a place on the D-pad. While they're awaiting orders, you can move up to the door and press A to utilize the "snake cam" to survey the area behind the door. Using the back button, two primary targets can be assigned for your team, which can be useful, if only for the small handful of hostage situations in the game. Despite taking an entire casino by siege, they apparently didn't capture many people, making these hostage situations few and far between.
Though the AI performs reasonably well, there are times where it is just, for lack of a better word, weird. There will be instances where your teammate will be taking fire, only to sit there exposed until they are rendered unconscious, or even worse, dead, resulting in a mission failure. Enemy units will at times run out and stand for a moment, seemingly oblivious to the presence of your team. Though enemy units can take cover, blind-fire, throw grenades, and use other tactics available to you, most of what actually makes them dangerous is their sheer numbers coupled with your low health.
However, there are two glaring problems with the enemy that shatter the realistic experience that Rainbow Six: Vegas tries to create. Enemies will yell and cuss at you, or talk amongst themselves, and will often state that they're moving up, throwing a grenade, or can't see you. While this can be advantageous to the player, it's an asset that breaks the illusory realism. You'll find yourself wondering why these highly trained individuals would give away their positions and tactics so readily, especially considering that there are military hand-signals for just about any action or statement one could ever need.
The largest offense, however, is reliance on spawning in enemies. In many areas, enemies will smash through windows and come down rappel-lines, which adds a level of dramatic flair that's quite pleasing. On the other hand, in other areas enemies will spawn behind you in areas that you've already cleared out, which can be quite annoying and demoralizing. Often, you'll find yourself wondering where the window you must've missed is, only to later see your nemeses emerging from a previously empty room, assault rifles in hand. Apparently, what makes terrorists so dangerous is their knack for teleportation. This sloppy way of dropping enemies into the fray is not only aggravating, it's an at best dubious and lazy tactic on behalf of the developers.
In its defense, Rainbow Six's action is so frantic and typically up against so many opponents from so many directions, that watching their intelligence and reactions to situations goes out the window. Under pressure, the enemy AI performs more than adequately; normally, it's only in minute numbers that their seemingly bumbling approach to international terrorism becomes noticeable.
From a technical perspective, Rainbow Six: Vegas looks very sharp and detailed, thanks to Epic Games' Unreal Tournament 3 engine. The models for guns and teammates look exceptionally exquisite, although many of the characters that are in the game but briefly, such as hostages, don't look nearly as well rendered or modeled. Explosions look and sound spot-on. Flashbangs produce a wonderful but understandably frustrating effect of making the screen go white with a loud ringing noise, which slowly fades back into normalcy. Movement is modeled fairly well, and in many cases is about as good as you can find in games. Enemies will cock their head as they strain to look over what they're hiding behind; at least, they do right before you pop-up with a 12-gauge shotgun.
When there's a lot going on screen, particularly a multitude effects or piled up dead terrorists - especially in the Terrorist Hunt mode, where the objective is to eliminate all the terrorists in a level, so body counts can become quite high - the frame-rate can be quite choppy. While not too terribly often or bothersome in single-player, in co-op Terrorist Hunt, it can become quite irritating. Though the graphics and textures are toned down for the multi-player modes, the game's presentation is still fairly slick. Guns and explosions look great; and the game runs about as well as your internet connection will allow.
Rainbow Six: Vegas multi-player offers a feature called Persistent Elite Creation (PEC), wherein your created identity that you will use in matches online gains experience points from matches, and these points will gradually increase your level, showcased by a rank. You'll begin your online identity as a lowly private, slowly climbing the ranks with determination all the way to the highest echelon of Elite. Each new rank that you achieve unlocks new features that you can use to customize or outfit your character, such as new camouflage. Accessories, such as tactical helmets or balaclava that are purely decorative can also be acquired. You'll also be able to outfit yourself with body, shoulder, arm, and leg armor, and can pick light, medium, and heavy types, having to choose between protection and mobility. New armor pieces are available for procurement, although all pieces perform just as well as the other variants in its class, so the differences are purely aesthetic.
Of course, what every aspiring new recruit wants is to unlock weapons. While it's neat that a number of the weapons must be acquired through dedication to the game's online experience, this also creates a question of balance insofar as playing against other players is concerned. Due to tweaks in weapon performance for online play, there are certain guns with drastic advantages. The primary concern is that the two best pistols, the Desert Eagle handgun and Raging Bull revolver, are quite superior to the sidearms initially available. Certain guns also feel more superior to others in its category, and while each weapon receives a rating for damage, accuracy, and range, there are other factors to bear in mind as well. Rate of fire and recoil are two very important parts of choosing effective weaponry, but these are regretfully omitted.
There are a number of modes available to play against your fellow Rainbow Sixers, starting with the obligatory (Team) Sharpshooter, a fancy word for death-match. Other modes include Team Sharpshooter, Attack & Defend, (Team) Survival, Retrieval, Co-op story, and Co-op Terrorist Hunt. Save the last two, up to sixteen people can play against each other in the various adversarial modes, each with its own objectives and conditions for winning. As a part of the PEC, winning a match nets far more experience than losing a match, so it's always in the best interest to win, not only for bragging rights and trash talking, but to more quickly approach the rank of Elite.
There is also a downloadable pack available for 800 Microsoft Points that includes two new game modes - Assassination and Conquest - as well as three new maps, and two touched-up versions of existing maps. Fortunately, one doesn't have to pay for the approximately ten dollar expansion pack, but instead merely play online with the retail version of Rainbow Six: Vegas if they wish.
Summary:
Its competent story-mode, coupled with a variety of multi-player modes available online or off, Rainbow Six: Vegas is certainly a solid title, and one not to be missed by any fan of shooters. With sleek presentation, exciting and immersing game-play that strikes a strong balance between intense gunfighting and strategy, all topped off with 43 achievements scattered throughout each of the game's modes all adds up to a great addition to any gamer's collection.
Rainbow Six: Vegas puts you in the rubber sole molded combat boots of Logan Keller, Team Leader for Rainbow. The campaign mode's levels are divided into chapters. Each chapter consists of a number of individual areas within the overall location, with varying objectives that will need to be completed. Though it may seem peculiar at first, Rainbow Six: Vegas in fact begins in Mexico, with Rainbow hot on the heels of international terrorist and general ne'er-do-well Irena Morales. Much of the opening portion of Mexico is, in fact, a rather large training mission, and offers up a great variety of the game-play that will be seen throughout the rest of the game, but at a pace that feels very natural and fluid. You'll get a chance to rappel, use a fast-rope, climb up or slide down ladders, engage in intense firefights, and frequently take cover.
As a tactical first-person shooter, Rainbow Six: Vegas creates a strong sense of needing to act quickly and precisely to adapt to the situations at hand. Vegas continues the tradition of having an invisible amount of health that will slowly replenish as you avoid injury. Instead of a visible health-bar, or some other archaic form of knowing how close to death you are, your vision worsens as you succumb to more trauma. As damage accrues, the screen becomes red and increasingly blurred. When you're almost dead, the entire screen turns to a fuzzy black and white, where even the closest of objects is practically indiscernible. This adds a strong sense of urgency, partly because your sight can become so poor that seeing a safe escape route becomes difficult, if not impossible.
On the game's Normal difficulty, you can sustain quite a number of hits before you are put down. On Realistic difficulty, one false move can and will prove to be instantly fatal. That's not to say that Normal is a cake-walk. One bullet to the head - or a grenade thrown between the feet - can be enough to take you out. Often, you'll find yourself suppressed and outnumbered by terrorists armed just as well as you are. This all helps to gear the Normal difficulty away from being a mere run-'n'-gun affair, and provides one of the more core elements of Rainbow Six: Vegas. There are plenty of check-points that autosave your progress throughout the campaign, so you never feel as if you'll have to repeat a large enough chunk to warrant being frustrated, merely a little perturbed.
While fighting the assault-rifle toting, Kevlar-armored baddies, you'll quickly find that parked cars, slot-machines on the casino floors, and even potted-plants or dumpsters are your second best friends. Running up to just about any object and holding the left-trigger will put your back against the object in a covered position, with the camera pulled out to a third-person perspective. Cover is one of the primary tactics used in Rainbow Six: Vegas, whether it's solo play or against up to fifteen others in the adversarial modes. While behind cover, the camera can be moved to survey over the short wall, or what's down the hallway. This allows you to set up your next move, whether it's to throw a grenade or lean up or out from cover to shoot at someone, or to merely hold down the right-trigger button to lay down blind-fire. While this is highly inaccurate, it is extremely useful in that it keeps you well-covered. Though you have a reticle in the single-player, the cover system is so superbly implemented that it becomes second nature to line your shots up perfectly, which is great practice for popping out against human opponents online.
Thankfully, you'll have plenty of firepower, so you won't just feel like a sitting duck behind that wall. Rainbow Six: Vegas gives you a number of options, from submachine guns, assault rifles, light machine guns, sniper rifles (which, in true FPS fashion, are useless in single-player, but excellent in skilled hands online), shotguns, and pistols for firearms to a riot shield, as well as explosives such as fragmentation, smoke and incendiary grenades, flashbangs, and breaching charges. Online, you'll also get the chance to try your hand at some gadgets and other goodies to annoy your opponents, such as tear gas, which blurs vision, a radar jamming device, and motion-sensor.
You'll also have access to infrared-vision and night-vision goggles at any time to help you hunt down all these evil-doers. While the fish-eyed perspective of the infrared is great, its visibility range is fairly limited, and helpful only in close-quarters. Infrared's primary purpose, however, is that it can be used to see through the veil of a smoke grenade, which comes quite in handy. The night-vision, on the other hand, is fairly worthless. Most areas are lit well enough that you don't need the aid. On the rare occasion that you might, the night-vision merely saturates everything in a dull, listless green, rather than giving any impression of light amplification. The visible distance is regretfully laughable with night-vision as well, making long-range battles in the very few areas where you actually cannot see without one of the types of vision impossible, outside of a lucky shot shooting in the direction the enemies' bullets are coming from.
Though you can pick up weapons and ammunition from enemy troops, you unfortunately are unable to strip them of any grenades, despite their ability to throw seemingly limitless amounts. Though it's obviously for game balance, it bears being mentioned. You'll be able to change equipment between chapter areas, or in equipment caches that you'll occasionally stumble across in levels, so you won't be relegated entirely to enemy equipment.
While you'll need to be flexible to the ever-changing battlefield, your team of two that accompanies you through the campaign unfortunately leaves much to be desired, from a tactically-stringent standpoint. Your commands are fairly unimpressive, running the gamut from toggling between "follow" and "hold" with down on the D-pad, to "move there" with a mere push of the A button. You can also alter the ROE (Rules of Engagement) for your team between Infiltrate and Assault, which changes the way they engage enemy units between "shoot when shot at" and "shoot on contact," respectively, and also changes the options available when in position next to a door.
With your team stacked-up, you can have them frag and clear, open and clear, flash and clear, breach and clear, or smoke and clear, depending on their current ROE. Each of the three options available in the current ROE are given a place on the D-pad. While they're awaiting orders, you can move up to the door and press A to utilize the "snake cam" to survey the area behind the door. Using the back button, two primary targets can be assigned for your team, which can be useful, if only for the small handful of hostage situations in the game. Despite taking an entire casino by siege, they apparently didn't capture many people, making these hostage situations few and far between.
Though the AI performs reasonably well, there are times where it is just, for lack of a better word, weird. There will be instances where your teammate will be taking fire, only to sit there exposed until they are rendered unconscious, or even worse, dead, resulting in a mission failure. Enemy units will at times run out and stand for a moment, seemingly oblivious to the presence of your team. Though enemy units can take cover, blind-fire, throw grenades, and use other tactics available to you, most of what actually makes them dangerous is their sheer numbers coupled with your low health.
However, there are two glaring problems with the enemy that shatter the realistic experience that Rainbow Six: Vegas tries to create. Enemies will yell and cuss at you, or talk amongst themselves, and will often state that they're moving up, throwing a grenade, or can't see you. While this can be advantageous to the player, it's an asset that breaks the illusory realism. You'll find yourself wondering why these highly trained individuals would give away their positions and tactics so readily, especially considering that there are military hand-signals for just about any action or statement one could ever need.
The largest offense, however, is reliance on spawning in enemies. In many areas, enemies will smash through windows and come down rappel-lines, which adds a level of dramatic flair that's quite pleasing. On the other hand, in other areas enemies will spawn behind you in areas that you've already cleared out, which can be quite annoying and demoralizing. Often, you'll find yourself wondering where the window you must've missed is, only to later see your nemeses emerging from a previously empty room, assault rifles in hand. Apparently, what makes terrorists so dangerous is their knack for teleportation. This sloppy way of dropping enemies into the fray is not only aggravating, it's an at best dubious and lazy tactic on behalf of the developers.
In its defense, Rainbow Six's action is so frantic and typically up against so many opponents from so many directions, that watching their intelligence and reactions to situations goes out the window. Under pressure, the enemy AI performs more than adequately; normally, it's only in minute numbers that their seemingly bumbling approach to international terrorism becomes noticeable.
From a technical perspective, Rainbow Six: Vegas looks very sharp and detailed, thanks to Epic Games' Unreal Tournament 3 engine. The models for guns and teammates look exceptionally exquisite, although many of the characters that are in the game but briefly, such as hostages, don't look nearly as well rendered or modeled. Explosions look and sound spot-on. Flashbangs produce a wonderful but understandably frustrating effect of making the screen go white with a loud ringing noise, which slowly fades back into normalcy. Movement is modeled fairly well, and in many cases is about as good as you can find in games. Enemies will cock their head as they strain to look over what they're hiding behind; at least, they do right before you pop-up with a 12-gauge shotgun.
When there's a lot going on screen, particularly a multitude effects or piled up dead terrorists - especially in the Terrorist Hunt mode, where the objective is to eliminate all the terrorists in a level, so body counts can become quite high - the frame-rate can be quite choppy. While not too terribly often or bothersome in single-player, in co-op Terrorist Hunt, it can become quite irritating. Though the graphics and textures are toned down for the multi-player modes, the game's presentation is still fairly slick. Guns and explosions look great; and the game runs about as well as your internet connection will allow.
Rainbow Six: Vegas multi-player offers a feature called Persistent Elite Creation (PEC), wherein your created identity that you will use in matches online gains experience points from matches, and these points will gradually increase your level, showcased by a rank. You'll begin your online identity as a lowly private, slowly climbing the ranks with determination all the way to the highest echelon of Elite. Each new rank that you achieve unlocks new features that you can use to customize or outfit your character, such as new camouflage. Accessories, such as tactical helmets or balaclava that are purely decorative can also be acquired. You'll also be able to outfit yourself with body, shoulder, arm, and leg armor, and can pick light, medium, and heavy types, having to choose between protection and mobility. New armor pieces are available for procurement, although all pieces perform just as well as the other variants in its class, so the differences are purely aesthetic.
Of course, what every aspiring new recruit wants is to unlock weapons. While it's neat that a number of the weapons must be acquired through dedication to the game's online experience, this also creates a question of balance insofar as playing against other players is concerned. Due to tweaks in weapon performance for online play, there are certain guns with drastic advantages. The primary concern is that the two best pistols, the Desert Eagle handgun and Raging Bull revolver, are quite superior to the sidearms initially available. Certain guns also feel more superior to others in its category, and while each weapon receives a rating for damage, accuracy, and range, there are other factors to bear in mind as well. Rate of fire and recoil are two very important parts of choosing effective weaponry, but these are regretfully omitted.
There are a number of modes available to play against your fellow Rainbow Sixers, starting with the obligatory (Team) Sharpshooter, a fancy word for death-match. Other modes include Team Sharpshooter, Attack & Defend, (Team) Survival, Retrieval, Co-op story, and Co-op Terrorist Hunt. Save the last two, up to sixteen people can play against each other in the various adversarial modes, each with its own objectives and conditions for winning. As a part of the PEC, winning a match nets far more experience than losing a match, so it's always in the best interest to win, not only for bragging rights and trash talking, but to more quickly approach the rank of Elite.
There is also a downloadable pack available for 800 Microsoft Points that includes two new game modes - Assassination and Conquest - as well as three new maps, and two touched-up versions of existing maps. Fortunately, one doesn't have to pay for the approximately ten dollar expansion pack, but instead merely play online with the retail version of Rainbow Six: Vegas if they wish.
Summary:
Its competent story-mode, coupled with a variety of multi-player modes available online or off, Rainbow Six: Vegas is certainly a solid title, and one not to be missed by any fan of shooters. With sleek presentation, exciting and immersing game-play that strikes a strong balance between intense gunfighting and strategy, all topped off with 43 achievements scattered throughout each of the game's modes all adds up to a great addition to any gamer's collection.
