I have been to Las Vegas on one occasion and it was such an experience that I will never forget it as long as I walk this earth. The lights, the money, the strange people; it all adds up to an environment unlike any other place on earth. So it would only be normal for the setting that is Las Vegas to show up in videogames all over the world. The town has made some small guest appearances in past games but it has yet to be the sole location for a game. Well scratch that off your list, as the people behind the infamous Rainbow Six series are taking on Las Vegas in full force. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas is the most recent edition of the Rainbow Six series that has lead a long life starting off on the PC some ten years ago. The fine folks over at Ubisoft decided it was time to revisit the famous series and add some new features as well. These new features, along with the classic Rainbow Six single-player add up to one hell of a game. I haven’t even mentioned the multiplayer yet and I am already raving about how awesome this game is! Read on to find out why this game stacks up to even the best of best games out there on the Xbox 360, and why gamers will look to Rainbow Six Vegas as the standard for realistic first-person shooters in the next-generation of videogames.
The first thing you need to do before booting up your copy of R6 Vegas is to forget ever first-person shooter you have played in the past, including Halo. Unless you have played a Rainbow Six title before then you need to understand that Vegas falls into the category of realistic shooter, meaning one to two shots and your dead, simple as that. For some gamers this may be a turnoff but to many others (me included) it is what makes this game so fun, the suspense of dying at any moment makes you play in a totally different style than ever before. Once you start up the single-player campaign mode (in two different levels of difficulty) you will begin your mission as a Rainbow Six operative (the Rainbow’s are an elite group of anti-terrorist soldiers). Funny thing is the developers decided to start you off not in Las Vegas, but in the slums of Mexico. This choice may seem weird at first but it was smart because it gets you used to the controls and acts as a training level without seeming anything like one.
I don’t want to go too much into the storyline as it will spoil it for many people playing the game for the first time but I will say that you travel from Mexico to Las Vegas, to the Nevada Dam, to a secret Research Lab. The majority of the game takes place in Las Vegas and consists of either street or casino levels. Some of the casinos are amazingly lavish with expensive gold and diamond chandeliers, while others are still being constructed. My personal favorite level was the wannabe stratosphere (all of the casinos are replicas of real ones but with fake names) that towers high above the terror ridden Las Vegas strip. The game includes a decently long campaign mode that will take you 10-15 hours on “normal” mode and a good 20+ hours on “realistic” difficulty. The cool thing about the campaign mode was after beating it once I wanted to instantly go back in and play it again on the “realistic” setting.
The controls in Rainbow Six Vegas are your basic first-person shooter controls with a little next-generation spice thrown in for good measure. You control the movement of your character with the left analog stick and look around with the right one, one trigger fires and another moves you to cover. Speaking of the cover system, this is something all new that has never been part of a Rainbow Six game before now. Using the left trigger you can quickly move to cover (think Gears of War) and either hide to reload/heal or peak out to snipe off the terrorists. Perfecting the cover system is, like in Gears of War, key to survival in the Rainbow Six universe. While it is not as important as it is in Gears it will make completing the game much easier. The four face buttons do things like reload, toss grenades, open doors, etc.
