The city of fortune, the city that never sleeps, Las Vegas is where the latest Rainbow Six installment takes place. The first Rainbow Six was released by Red Storm Entertainment in 1998 but the game was so successful that several expansion packs and add-ons followed. Because of the popularity of the game, Red Storm was later acquired by Ubisoft, who currently develops and publishes its games.

Ubisoft released Rainbow Six Vegas for both PC and XBOX 360. Unlike GRAW, where the stories were different, here we have the same game. The PC version was ported from XBOX360 but don't worry because Ubi has done a really good job.

Sin City, the city with 36.7 million men, women and children visitors each year, will soon be a place where terrorists will rule and it's up to Rainbow Six team to solve the situation. You will play as the leader of a three-men squad named Logan Keller. You and your team will have to see what is causing problems and save the day. The story is very interesting and you won't find the real plot until the end of the game.

A bond named team

What is so excellent in Vegas is that now you can really feel that you are part of an intense situation where the bad guys are waiting for you to make a mistake and you are history. To survive this game you will have to use any cover you can find between you and the enemies and to try to maximize your killing because they surely will. Cars, crates, doors, concrete slabs, and pretty much anything else that can stop a bullet is a life savior. As I said, Ubi ported the PC version from XBOX 360 but they done it so great that you can do anything with the mouse and the keyboard. For example you can hide behind the cover, you can embrace the walls to become harder to hit, you can even peep around the corner to see what's the situation or even provide cover fire for your teammates until they reach a safer position or they can take out the bad guys. To move your teammates you will simply point the crosshair where you want them and press space. They will move there and wait for further orders or if left on their own they will try to act the best they can. With the Alt key you can tell them to hold position or to follow you.


Rules of Engagement

Because each situation demands an appropriate solution, sometimes you will have to tell your teammates exactly what to do. For instance, a hostage rescue operation can't be handled as a fight in the bar. You will have to tell your teammates to infiltrate (to respond to fire only and not shoot on sight), you must use a snake camera on the door at the room you are about to enter to see what the situation is and think the best strategy. To ease your job, Ubi allows you to mark two targets which your team will try to eliminate first. This is very useful because this way you will make sure that the ones that are pointing the gun to the hostages are the first to go down. By using rules of engagement wisely you will save time by focusing on the situation at hand and not trying to keep your team alive.


Staying alive

If you will approach Vegas like any other shooter, where you try to frag everything on sight, you will be dead most of the times. Why? Because the AI is quite intelligent and most of the times the AI players will be better positioned than you. To overcome them you must play as an elite soldier, try to evaluate your options, take cover (anything you can find to hide behind, duck beneath or anything capable of stopping a bullet or hide you from the enemies is crucial to your success) and use fire wisely to have a chance to survive. Rainbow Six Vegas is not about making the most frags but staying alive and completing your objectives by any means. The game features a checkpoint system which means that you won't be able to save during you game. The checkpoints are placed quite well and before each major fight you will have a check point. The major battles are well scripted, with enemies coming in rappel from above, with snipers from the rooftop, enemies throwing grenades at you, making your job really hard. If one or both teammates are being injured you will be able to save them by injecting a magic serum but if you are injured the game takes you back to the last visited checkpoint.

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The enemy

Rainbow Six Vegas features a wide variety of enemies. The AI is intelligent, knows how to take you down, but they are vulnerable and this is why they will try, same as you, to take advantage of the environment. If there are crates, barrels or obstacles in the room, they will use them and will make your job harder. I found myself sometimes pinned down, with my team injured because we were surrounded and we couldn't fight back as the enemies were using cover fire while advancing to our positions. Sometimes I even got killed in the back because a enemy hided behind a small room that I forgot to check. All this will make your advancing very hard, with long, exhausting battles filled with breath-holding silences, peeks around corners and intermittent, staccato bursts of gunfire. The action is sometimes so intense and so dramatic that will make you take a break before continuing the game.


The equipment

Because you are part of an elite commando unit, you have access to some pretty interesting gear which most old Splinter Cell players are already familiar with. You have thermal and night vision goggles, grenades ranging from flashbang to frag grenades, and 33 guns in 6 main sections. You can choose pistols (useful when you are in rappel), short machine guns (close range, high accuracy), long machines guns (when needed a lot of ammo between reloads), shotguns (high damage, short range) or assault guns (medium in all aspects - my favorite being SCARC-H CQC with a 6x scope). For snipers, you can choose between 4 weapons like SV-98 or Scout Tactical.


Together or against each other? That is the question ...

The Rainbow Six Vegas multiplayer features a lot of options. You can play the single-player campaign cooperatively, both in story mode and in terrorist hunt mode, which puts you and your buddies against a bunch of randomly placed terrorists on existing or specially created maps. You can team up with up to three people to play the campaign which is intriguing since in the original version your team has only three people in. If you play on the realistic difficulty, the job is tough enough so you really must use effective team tactics to complete some of the harder missions, and there's something very cool about being able to make a strategy with your buddies while in the middle of a fight. But there is a setback: the game doesn't knows how to advance to the next map automatically, you will have to do it manually or to set up the server to know what map you want to play next. Anyway, it's fun to play with people instead of your Rainbow Six teammates.

Aside from the campaign, there are more competitive modes available to the online players (up to 16 people can play on a map). Capture the flag mode has been named retrieval and consists in collecting barrels and bringing them to your base. The team collecting a number of barrels wins. This mode features respawns so if you die you are back in the game to help your team. The multiplayer action is just as intense as the single-player game, especially since you can use the same cover tactics that you used in the campaign. Our only major issue with the PC version is that there's a known and nasty bug that causes the entire game to crash if you attempt to search for a game using the default settings. You have to narrow down your search parameters to avoid crashing the game. Also, the PC version lacks the built-in voice support found in the Xbox 360 version, so it's harder to communicate with your teammates in the middle of an intense firefight.

Technical stuff

Rainbow Six Vegas features some excellent graphics and the PC version looks just as good as the Xbox 360 version (some say it's slightly better in some places). Like all good looking games, your framerate depends heavily on your hardware and you will need a powerful computer to run the game at high detail with fast frame rates. The details are amazing, it's almost photo-realistic. Your teammates, the gear, the environment is modeled superbly and it makes you take a good look at your team and their gear if the bullets weren't flying near your head. We have Las Vegas as settings but it's all fictional, there's no real casino simulated in the game. You have slot machines, Elvis songs and a John Wayne action.

Regarding the sound, the voice actings varies from excellent to average. Your main character and your teammates have excellent voices while the bad guys are yelling various tactics between them but done in an average manner. You will hear you team screaming for help when wounded, asking for cover fire when swapping magazines and such. The weapon sounds are pretty authentic, though at this point every realistic shooter has the same level of effects.

 

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Gameplay: 95

One of the best action games of 2006. I could say that is the one with the most adrenaline if you ask me.

Graphics: 91

Ranging from photo-realistic when needed to average when you don't need much detail, Rainbow Six Vegas looks very good.

Sound: 85

Not perfect but surely one of the best. You can almost hear the bullets flying by and the enemy using an assault gun to exterminate you and your squad. Watch out for that grenade soldier. Soldier?

Multiplayer: 87

A lot of modes allow you to test your skills with and against human opponents not giving you a chance to get bored.

Hardware: 80

The game is very hardware dependent but it gives you a beautiful game if you have the right computer.