Customer Reviews

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Red Storm has helmed the Rainbow Six franchise since it's inception in the late nineties, now with Ubisoft taking the reins they've both raised the bar and lowered it drastically in certain aspects.

First of all, the gameplay is vastly improved from previous titles. The horribly lame "lean" option has been upgraded to a complex cornering system. Now you can hug the wall, find the enemy from relative cover, and swing around a corner with your weapon at the ready - like a true tactical operative. The shooting, strafing, movement is all top-notch as one would expect from an R6 title.

However, the planning and team aspects of the game have been reduced or in some cases deleted. In previous titles you could command a team of up to eight operatives and then systematically plan your assault by assigning waypoints and goals utilizing a map layout of the mission.

Now your team never consists of more than three members (including yourself) and you cannot plan your mission out. At all.

It's a bit silly, isn't it? The last thing the supposedly most elite tactial unit on Earth would do is send in only three men Rambo-style. Granted, your missions are vaguely planned out by the developers, but I assure you it's not nearly as much fun as doing it yourself.

Another major disappoinment longtime players will notice is a severe lack of mission variety. In previous titles you would find yourself at a millionaire's contemporary summer villa one day, at a snowy European village another, a meat packing plant in South America the next, and still later end up at an oil rig in the Pacific Ocean. Now the game primarily focuses on only one location - Las Vegas. Though there are a couple others (the first missions in Mexico, the dam outside of Vegas) but still you'll find yourself wishing for a bit more variety.

Naturally, I and anyone else should expect this from a title that clearly bills itself as "Rainbow Six: VEGAS" - yet it's still a broad and unwanted change from previous titles.

Also, a note on the replayability of the title. With the last few R6 games we were presented with a terrorist hunt option, which allowed us to play a single customized mission. You could choose to have a hostage situation to diffuse or just straight terrorist killing, then you could choose your map (from a few multiplayer ones and whatever single-player maps you had completed) and plan out your team assault. You could also choose to do the "Lone Wolf" option, which just send yourself in with no team to eliminate the terrorists.

Now, with this title, you're reduced to a strictly lone wolf mode. No team, no plans, and your character insanely doesn't even opt for a helmet by default. It's still fun, sure, but the severe lack of options once again limits it.

While this is an outstanding game and certainly worthy of your time and money - they missed a few key components. Hopefully with the next title Ubisoft will combine both the strictly tactical methods of Red Storm's titles with their more "Metal Gear Solid" run-and-gun style.

If you are a fan of the Ravenshield/Athena Sword era of Rainbow Six, you were no doubt as traumatized as I by the 'Lockdown' fiasco. Unfortunately, this rendition of Rainbow Six doesn't fair much better. Yes, the graphics are much better, and yes, the AI is too. However, that's about the only things in the plus column for this blatant and shameless grab at PC gamers' wallets by Ubisoft. It's just a bland, canned port from a console game.

This game 'misses' with things like a reduced arsenal (there were significantly more guns in Ravenshield), painfully scripted events, an EXTREMELY shallow difficulty range (you can only choose from 'Normal' and 'Realistic', and even on Realistic you can recover from near life-ending injuries in about 30 seconds). The gun specs are also, well, cheezy. There's very little to differentiate them from one-another, and they do not have any technical info listed like you might expect to see in a 'serious' modern combat game (i.e. muzzle velocities, weapon history, etc.)

Due to the lack of a real spectrum of difficulty settings, if you play this game solo you will spend 70% of your time replaying parts of the game you've already played because you'll frequently get killed by a head shot right before a checkpoint...and then have to replay the past 10 minutes of the game over, and over, and over again. The game chooses when it saves, and you get no input on the matter. There isn't even a quicksave, so plan on replaying the same stuff. This type of 'save feature' was barely tolerated in gaming 10 years ago. Why Ubi thought that this would be acceptable in a modern game is absolutely beyond comprehension.

To add insult to injury, the duck-and-cover concept of hiding behind walls and spraying fire at your enemy doesn't get it done. It's a great concept, but if you try to apply it you frequently get disoriented as Vegan mentioned. The AI is good enough to capitalize on your player's temporary paralysis when this happens and they kill you. You get used to the awkward mechanics of this feature over time, but it never is as intuitive as Ubi would have you believe.

The one thing that Ubi can pull from this burning wreckage is the enemy AI. It's actually very good. Enemies attempt flanking maneuvers, and they can be suppressed very realistically with suppression-type weapons while you send your team (other players or AI teammates) around to flank.

If we're lucky, Ubi will return to the winning Ravenshield/Athena Sword formula, incorporate this game's improved AI, work the glaring kinks out of the duck-and-cover feature and, most importantly, grasp the notion that a player should be allowed to save when he or she wants to. Replaying the same painfully boring levels should never be a subsitute for poor game design! Two stars.

I notice not to many favorable reviews of this game, which I find rather odd. I am a fan of the Rainbow Six series, but I appreciate the fact that this game is a bit simplified (read: less tedious) from those previous versions.

I like the fact that you can outfit yourself with what you need/prefer, and the fact that your squad mates are actually pretty darned good. In the Vegas area, you have two with you mos to the time, one with a standard assault rifle/sub-machine gun combo, and the other with a light machine gun/sub combo. Both guys are equipped with smoke, flash, and frag grenades, as well as breaching charges.

As far as the graphics... awesome. Possibly the poor reviews for the graphics of this game are people with no DX9 support, or lower end systems, but the graphics in this game are top notch. You will need something fairly serious to run the game, but mine runs just fine on an AMD 3800X2 w/1GB DDR2 and a mid level 8600GT graphics card. The higher the better, as I can't turn everything on full without some frame rate droppage. If you plan on playing this online, and not getting owned, you'd need something faster than what I have.

Gameplay: straight forward, which I appreciate. I found at times on previous versions, the mission planning sessions to be a bit long in the tooth, especially when I just wanted to 'get to it already'. With this, you can. Your guys use cover wisely, and you can stage them at entry points to help you flank the enemy. The weapons sound FANTASTIC. Turn up the volume and let it rip... some of the most satisfying sounds in any tactical shooter I have heard. This includes reloading, and the way guns sound and operate with a suppressor on. Much quieter, but also much less damage and range. Guys with body armor are noticeably harder to take down, and the terrorist on the 'realistic' setting are very tough.

You'll need to plan your entry points, where your guys will need to be to cover you, and vice versa. As someone else mentioned, you will die, a lot. If you plan well, you won't. Use your squad mates effectively, learn to count on them, and you'll do fine. Don't assume the terrorist will miss, because while they might miss once, they won't miss the second time.

Things that would be nice: A mission editor. That is really the only thing I can find missing...

Conclusion: This game is very immersive. Fans of tactical shooters in general should be happy with this one. If you're looking to plan for 30 minutes before just making it happen, if you like the micro-management of the previous Rainbow Six series, you may not like this. But if you want a challenging environment, with great graphics and even better audio (seriously, it's SICK), I'd go for this one, hands down.

Rainbow Six: Vegas represents an evolutionary step forward for tactical shooters. The "context-sensitive" controls currently being pioneered by this game as well as Gears of War is, in my opinion, the next step for first-person shooters. The added elements of strategy and realism e.g. covering fire and using cover, make the tactics of even the original greats such as Counter-Strike silly by comparison.
That being said; however, this particular game suffers from some a few major issues that preclude it from being lauded as "the best tactical-shooter" to come. These problems all stem from one serious development mistake - this game was developed for the XBox 360 and later "ported" to the PC. Bad move. I am not a "console-hater" or a snob, but this is a serious mistake that is being made by more and more developers/producers lately. PC gamers don't pay hundred or thousands more(than a console gamer) to play Xbox quality games. We want the best! Multi-platform games should be designed for the PC and than "scaled-down" for consoles where necessary. The clunky interface/menus and crudely done online matchmaking system are perfect examples of the pitfalls of console to PC ports. Do I even have to mention the save-game system? Ubisoft should know better.
In the end, the game is still fun in both single and multi-player modes. It is just disappointing to see a game with such potential held back by a backwards development strategy.

Vegas 2 leaves a lot to be desired. but the first one got a lot right. Its fairly fast paced once it starts. Lots of baddies and a pretty good selection of weapons. ammo lockers are few and far between till later levels but are very helpful. the snake cam is a nice feature. Sniper Rifles are not a great item in this particular game due to ammo capacity and number of bad guys that often charge you. The level details are done rather well, and the vehicles in the scenery take damage. The enemy is fun too listen to at first, with them complaining or talking about things. The majority of weapons feel good with the balance they are given. Duck and cover and shoot and scoot is the name of this game basically, and while some of the levels are repetitive its still pretty addicting. I found myself wanting to play it through without stopping. A few scenes like the theatre were just frustrating at how many times i died. I mainly writing this review since its a older game, but one that many people may have missed the first time around, and lately its been very reasonably priced. making it a gem for single player at least.

I just don't get it anymore. Studios and gaming companies spend years and millions building these games, and they can't even put in a stinkin save system. OK, now thats off my chest.

Rainbow 6 Vegas is really a nice game. Pretty good gameplay, really good story in general, amazing scenery in the Las Vegas parts of the game, and in general, reasonably fun to play, albeit its somewhat short.

Now its almost completely ruined by consolitis. There is NO SAVE SYSTEM...., which means that you have to play the same scene 100 times over and over again until you figure out the tiny mystery that happens right BEFORE the next checkpoint. Some scenes, I wasted days on, over and over again. Totally maddening. Too bad really, as if there were just a simple quicksave system, it would have been much more tolerable.

The weapons reload method is somewhat novel, but generally dumb. There are huge supply crates all over and you walk up, the game kind of pauses, and you reload. Its agonizingly slow sometimes. Also, the walking speed is painfully slow as well. There is no running, nor jumping.

A couple of times I had to start an entire checkpoint over because I got stuck somewhere and simply could not get out. This of course happens in lots of games, but as there is no Jump function, when you get stuck, you get totally stuck.

All in all, I did like the game in general. But I'll wait for the sequel to be in the bargain bin before I waste any more money on a weak console port.

As many others have said, the lack of PC specific development for this game ruined it, as many other games have been ruined (Halo 2 comes to mind, as do dozens of others).

Rainbow Six Vegas is no doubt a good game. It is very well put together - good levels, good tactics, good overall design. The following are lists of the pros and cons:

Pros
1.)Tactics
2.)Level design
3.)Missions
4.)Story
5.)The views from the tops of buildings down onto the city of Las Vegas are very nice, and include accurate models of landmarks.
6.)Equipment/gun assortment

Cons
1.)You can't jump. This takes away a major part of realism.
2.)By defult, you are "running". Well, that is a walk speed, and the walk speed is so slow, that you might as well not even have the control.
3.)Even though there are generally two routes or more to take to get to an objective, I personally still felt like I was on a strictly set path. This takes away the exploration freedom that you get in a game like Crysis or even a little in Call of Duty 4. The "set path" feeling really ticked me off because I wanted to go explore Vegas after seeing all of those beautiful views!


Even though those things were taken away, I still had quite a bit of fun playing Rainbow Six Vegas. I would recommend it to the gamer who likes tactical missions and leading squads, but if you like to wander around the maps, explore, and you like to feel total realism such as jumping and running, this is not the game for you.

Great graphics, great story line, lots and lots of action, great combat system, and actually your teammates are not that stupid!
The game it's great, it gives you a lot of options to approach your missions, from stealth to rock and roll.
Certainly awaiting the second release

No Ending. Thanks Ubisoft. To Be Continued. Weak! The graphics are great and the weapons are fun. The AI is weak and your team says the same things over and over again. Annoying. The levels are straight forward and bland. Dantes Inferno is the worst level and they saved it for the end of the Vegas levels. This game could have been 5 stars with better AI, a lot more sayings from team mates, more civilians running away and maybe some good one liners, and an ENDING! TO BE CONTINUED ... what a rip.

I've been a diehard R6 player since the very first release of Rainbow Six, so I've seen it develop from a very rigid FPS to something of an atrocity/Xbox 360 reject.

First, Vegas's single player storyline is way too short. Second, the gameplay isn't very realistic nor is it tactical. The game kept crashing to the desktop whenever I used the snake cam. I ended up just storming through doors to keep the game running. The weapon choices were interesting but they left out the basic M4/M16 rifle. The light machine guns and sniper rifles were quite useless. The entire story-mode revolves around CQB to medium range engagements. I just equipped myself with a 552 + ACOG and a M9 + reflex sight and that was pretty much all I needed.

What's the deal with having only 2 R6 operatives as backup throughout the entire story?

The game play interface is also very clunky and unintuitive. It seems designed/catered towards console gamers with the unrealistic "cover" mode. There's also no prone mode, rolling, or sprint feature.

They have incorrectly modeled some of the weapons, yet again. I would expect nothing short of tactical perfection out of anything carrying Tom Clancy's name, however Rainbow Six 3 and Rainbow Six Vegas have incorrectly modeled the FN P90. In Vegas, they modeled it so at least the player in the first perspective view would not see the shell casings being ejected. If you use the take cover key while shooting the P90, you can obviously see the shells being ejected to the right of the weapon. This happens in both Vegas and R6 Three. The real P90 ejects the shells straight down behind the trigger hand due to the design of the weapon.

In addition to the P90 quirk, there are numerous errors throughout the arsenal. The SCAR-H only has a 20rd magazine capacity as it fires the larger 7.62x51mm NATO cartridge (same dimensions .308 Winchester). The P90 is also modeled to have 3 round burst while it does not have such an option in the real world. One can argue that this is a video game, but if you want tactical realism then it should have accurate modeling to simulate the real weapons. Otherwise, they might as well use weapons from Unreal Tournament III since it is a video game.

The bottom line is that Vegas has departed from a tactical FPS and there are quite a few bugs. If the single player game were longer and more detailed, I would have given it 4 stars overall.

In addition, Joanna's character is VERY annoying and should not have been included in the game.