Rainbow Six: Vegas
For Xbox 360, PC.
Verdict: Shiny but not new.
Rating: 3½/5
With the enticing neon glow of Las Vegas beckoning the bullet holes of your ill judged headshots, Rainbow Six: Vegas replaces the traditional dark corridors and dirty streets with orange hued casinos, one armed bandits and glossy bars...once you’re past the first, dark corridored, dirty street filled level that is.
As high expectations are initially dashed in exchange for training you in the new, cover based mechanics of its gunplay and the grounding of plot devices, RS: Vegas begins with a sense of unremarkable deja vu - same old guns, same old cannon fodder. Run, hide, shoot faceless terrorist, run again.
Thankfully the trip to the Strip perks things up, strategically as well as visually with the cover of abandoned limos and gambling machines proving far more interesting than rust covered railings and train yards.
Essentially a linear amalgamation of Ghost Recon and Splinter Cell meshed with the immediacy of an FPS, Rainbow Six never feels quite individual enough to warrant its existence beyond perspective change. The cover based mechanics, allowing you to switch to a wall-hugging third person for blindfire gunplay, feel clunky and intrusive and the controls for directing squad mates in the wild are limiting and basic but they work well enough in simple situations where a door needs breaching or an enemy needs flanking.
Continuing with its own unique online vision, Vegas uses the series’ ‘Persistent Elite Creation’, a feature that allows you to create your own evolving online character, right down to using your own web-cam snapped face. Along with a massive variety of unlockable armour types, clothing and customisable guns it has everything for the modern sharp-shooter looking to hone their multiplayer skills.
Unfortunately, where Rainbow Six: Vegas succeeds in creating a beautifully rendered city of sin, replete with high end mo-cap animation and stylised blurring, it falls down in almost equal measure by providing little that is new or better.
With the difficulty on Realistic though it creates its own brand of fleeting mortality, with plenty of fear to offset the loathing generated by formulaic and linear gameplay.