Rainbow Six: Vegas

8.2

Format PC

Developer Ubisoft

Publisher Ubisoft

Genre First Person Shooter, Sim / Strategy

1 Comments

Irena Morales is a very naughty girl. Not only has she been sticking soggy pieces of chewing gum to the underside of tables, she and her team of Mexican terrorists are also dabbling with the idea of blowing up Las Vegas with a big bomb that goes boom and breaks stuff into little pieces. Sounds like a job for the Rainbow team and I'm not talking about Zippy, Bungle and George.

Rainbow Six: Vegas is a fairly triumphant return to form for the venerable Rainbow Six series, with Ubisoft Montreal striking an excellent compromise between the visceral realism so revered in the original Rainbow Six games and the all-out action approach so reviled in Rainbow Six: Lockdown. There's also far more location diversity this time around, with tight, claustrophobic areas mixed up with wide-open, sprawling spaces.

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BACK ON FORM
The result is a superbly paced campaign of room-clearing carnage, as you and your two AI-controlled sidekicks (the usual third member of your team seems to have gone AWOL) work your way through enemy-infested territories in order to save hostages and shatter Irena's plan of making the contents of a 100,000 slot machines rain down on the Nevada desert.

But before we get into the meat of the game, I need to make a confession. I like wearing... No, wait, wrong confession. What I meant to say was that for the first couple of missions, Vegas excited me about as much as a naked, wart-ridden granny (which is to say not at all, in case there was any lingering doubt your mind on that one). Starting out in a dusty Mexican town, Vegas makes the kind of first impression usually reserved for someone who's just turned up at a party and pissed on the carpet.

After having your eyes offended by the blocky front-end, the campaign's early missions then proceed to totter on the verge of tedium, feeling starved of entertainment, direction or tension, and lulling you into a false sense of insecurity for what's to come. Pockets of enemy resistance are wiped away with nonchalant ease as you cleave your way through the first couple of missions like a scimitar through butter. But then, all of a sudden, everything changes...

VEGAS BABY
After such a slow opening, you suddenly find yourself immersed in what's undoubtedly the most intense Rainbow Six game to date as the action switches to the light-drenched streets of Sin City itself.

It's here that you first start to appreciate Vegas's excellent damage system, which breathes new life into the series by allowing you to take anything from a couple to four or five shots before you drop dead (depending on whether you're playing on the 'Normal' or 'Realistic' difficulty setting).

However, unlike the 'three strikes and you're out' mechanic employed in previous Rainbow games, Vegas offers a tad more respiration space, by enabling you to duck down behind cover for a few seconds in order to regenerate your health.

What's that you read? Regenerating health? In a Rainbow Six game? Surely not! To which I retort, worry not my would-be anti-terrorist friend, because it's actually great and works in perfect unison with the well-spaced checkpoint save system.

When a chunk of searing lead pounds into you, your vision blurs violently, temporarily incapacitating you (or as good as). In this brief period, the enemy has the opportunity to close in and outflank you.

Brilliant, right? Well, almost. See, it would have been brilliant had the AI showed a consistent level of intelligence and tactical guile. Once again, the developers seem only too keen to push out the boundaries of graphical fidelity while the field of artificial intelligence is left miserably overlooked.

One minute you and your team are slinking your way through dank corridors, listening to the excellent incidental dialogue of two enemies situated around the next corner, before engaging in a seesawing firefight which sees the enemy taking cover and attempting to outmanoeuvre you.

Then, the next thing you know, you and your buddies are storming a room packed with villains, who, on your arrival, saunter around with general disinterest before kneeling down in the middle of the room, utterly ignoring the fact that you and your team are standing next to them with assault rifles pointing at their skulls.

DUMB FACE
The problems with Irena's goons don't stop there, as they don't fare too well in
the looks department either. In fact, the majority of them seemingly share the same sister and father, judging by their identikit, inbred, expressionless faces. You'd really expect better from a power-hungry beast like Vegas, which is driven by none other than the in-vogue Unreal Engine 3 and needs a fairly substantial set of specs to run smoothly.

While the locales are admirable - if hardly breathtaking - the majority of characters look dull and wooden by comparison. Hardly a compelling argument to make you shell out the best part of £250 on a 3D card so that you can play the game at a decent frame-rate, or even at all.

DUELS AND DUALITY
The unevenness of both the visuals and the AI is perhaps fitting, given that Vegas swings from the sublime to the substandard on a regular basis. And while the emphasis remains firmly biased in favour of quality throughout, there are precious few areas immune from criticism, a crying shame when you consider that Vegas has enough potential to suggest it could have been one of the finest team-based shooters ever to grace the PC.

However, one feature does manage to emerge untarnished by the wagging finger of judgement, and that's the new cover system. Whereas in earlier Rainbow Six games you'd find yourself clumsily leaning or 'slicing the pie' around each corner till your sights came to rest on the back of an enemy's cranium, you now have the option of pressing yourself against a wall and ducking out from behind cover to shoot at your opponents.

It's these moments that constitute some of Vegas's most captivating and intense gameplay. With the game's new, more frenetic pace (though still not as frenetic as Lockdown), taking cover creates a host of new options for you to tinker with. By slapping your back against a wall, the action switches to third-person mode, allowing you to monitor the movements of your enemies as they approach your hiding place. Think Splinter Cell on a caffeine trip and you'll get a rough idea of what I mean.

MOMENTS OF TRUTH
Your heart races as foes bear down on your position, the elevating soundtrack laying down a syncopated pulse while you wait for the perfect moment to duck out and unleash a salvo. There are few more satisfying moments than swinging out of cover and dropping a bad guy with a perfectly placed headshot, or laying down suppressing fire while sending your lads on a flanking excursion - replete with a packed lunch which the little blighters probably ate on the bus. In other words, there are plenty of opportunities to utter those immortal words: "I love it when a plan comes together." And that, surely, is what this type of tactical shooter is all about.

Not enough for you? Then how about the ability to shoot around corners without exposing yourself at all - a perfect tactic when an enemy bullet has distorted your vision and you need to buy some recovery time. In a word, brilliant.

Shame then that the same can't be said of your team-mates. Yes, they're highly (perhaps overly) compliant to your every whim (issued through a sublime context-sensitive command system - see 'Click & Conquer', left). However, they feel like a pair of conjoined twins forced apart against their will. These boys never leave each other's side, practically holding hands and exchanging wistful glances as bullets fly past their love-filled eyes.

To their credit, the lads can't half shoot, and it's all too easy and tempting to just send them on ahead to scope out an area, while you remain in relative safety behind a 4ft-thick concrete wall. It's a situation that's made worse by their seeming indestructibility. You may not be able to take much damage yourself, but these guys eat it up like a Fat Club member let loose on a shelf of pick 'n' mix.

Admittedly, you do have frequent call to take on the role of squad medic - sticking healing injections into your team-mates' backsides whenever they take a hit - but you never feel as though they're in any mortal danger. After you've revived them, you can just send them straight back into the danger zone with a pat on the back and a kind word. This isn't so much of a problem in the fiendishly hard 'Realistic' mode, but in 'Normal', it can sometimes be a serious hindrance to the tension levels.

STICK AND TWIST
Other areas are just as hit-and-miss. The voice-acting ranges from wooden to wonderful, with your character sounding like a hillbilly who'd be more at home shooting tin cans off tree stumps with his pa's shotgun than blasting the entrails out of a bomb-crazed terrorist.

The physics are generally impressive, but collision detection is suspect. Your arsenal is stunning both in terms of scope and realism but a smattering of weapons are sorely misjudged, especially the shield, which allows you to crawl around levels practically impervious to damage.

Hit-and-miss, hit-and-miss, hit-and-miss. That's Vegas in a nutshell.Now I don't want you getting the wrong impression here, because Vegas is in no way a poor game. It's really not. Far from it. It's an experience packed with thrills, tension, excellent pacing, a myriad of top-class multiplayer options and a half-decent plot that throws a few swerve balls at you when you're least expecting them.

The real problem is that it simply isn't as good as it could have been. Erratic AI, overly impervious sidekicks, some suspect voice-acting, patchily impressive and hugely power-hungry visuals. It's a list that adds up to a missed opportunity if ever I've seen one, but while Vegas may not quite have hit the jackpot, it does still manage to walk away a winner.

Martin Korda