Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas

Publisher: Ubisoft

Developer: Ubisoft Montreal

Release Date: 11/20/2006

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Back in the late 2000s, the Tom Clancy games were on top of the world. Engines that pushed consoles to their limits, great new ways to explore gameplay, fantastic shooting mechanics, and fun multiplayer modes. This was true across all the Tom Clancy franchises, from Ghost Recon to Splinter Cell. Rainbow Six was dormant for quite a few years before being rebooted in the Vegas series. You play as a team of three Rainbow Six operatives trying to thwart a terrorist attack in Las Vegas. Like most of these games, the story is only there to scoot the campaign along and isn’t memorable or anything interesting. There’s maybe a single cutscene per level, and calling these cutscenes is generous. Most scenes involve your operator talking to you via pre-rendered video in the corner of the screen or the Six team talking in a huddle. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but it doesn’t really need to be.

Rainbow Six is a very tactical game. You go in nearly blind and have to watch every single corner. The AI does a decent job in previous games of taking out enemies, and it’s the same case here. You can command your two squad mates to go anywhere with the A button, and an orange highlight will appear. This works great, as you can just point where you’re aiming and always have them scout ahead. We’ll come back to this later. You can order your squad to hold, follow, and stack up on doors, and this is sadly the only tactical part of the entire game that made it through. There’s a serious identity crisis with Vegas, as it can’t decide if it wants to be Call of Duty or Rainbow Six. This tug-of-war is felt in every part of the game, from multiplayer to the campaign to level design.

Going in slow is the name of the game, and that’s no exception even in this more arcadey title. You will die in just a couple of hits, and there are no difficulty options. You need to constantly send your team members ahead around every single corner. Even when you think all enemies are down, one will be hiding behind some box and pop up and kill you. I died dozens of times in this campaign because the levels are just not designed for tactics or even stealth. You can attach silencers to your weapons, and when you do, your teammates will as well. The issue here is once you enter a room everyone suddenly knows your there. Stealth is nearly useless. You can switch from full auto to single shot, which is really useful. Sadly, most levels aren’t designed for a group of three police special tactics officers. This game was designed for the military. Why is Rainbow Six taking down a terrorist group? It makes no sense.

There are many large open areas with tons of hiding spots for enemies. Some areas will have 20+ guys, and remember, you can die in just a couple of hits. You can back off and recover health, and the cover system is actually great. You can buckle against any wall or object and enter a third-person view similar to Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. You can blind fire or pop up and shoot enemies, but the enemy AI feels really unfair most of the time. They can hone in on you from really far away, and their blind fire is too accurate, but mine will barely graze an enemy in a closet. Your teammates are key to clearing out areas by ordering them around staircases, and some micromanagement is involved. You can send them into a room, and they will drop if there are too many enemies. You can revive your teammates with health injections, and these are unlimited, and order a member to revive the other too while you cover them. Some situations allowed for team members to go down at the wrong time and block a doorway. After so long their health goes from yellow to red, and then they die, but you get quite a bit of time to get to them. Enemies can throw grenades and flashbangs, and these are usually only useful in small rooms. They are pretty much useless in large open areas.

The only tactical part of the game is stacking up on doors and breaching them. You can snake cam under a door and tag up to two enemies. You can then order your teammates to breach, frag, or enter and clear a room. That’s it. You can order them up ladders, and you can occasionally rope down the side of the building and turn upside down to shoot inside, which was really fun, but there were only a few times you could do this. Most of the game is just moving from room to room and killing everything in sight, and it gets old really quick. There’s no variation, and you can’t even use the turrets in the game to make some fights a bit easier. I also found that checkpoints were poorly placed. I would need to have a teammate hack a computer, and then I would need to cover them. Instead of restarting before the hack, I would restart two to three rooms back and have to keep clearing them. This game becomes a frustrating chore after awhile because you can’t use any tactics in this game. It’s trying to be Rainbow Six mixed with some Ghost Recon and Call of Duty.

The multiplayer is where the game shines, and while the servers are long gone, you can still get some friends together to play online. I do remember playing the game back in the day online, and it was a blast, but far from what Call of Duty offered. Rainbow Six also looks great technically, even today, but it falls under the same tropes of the era, such as too much bloom lighting and everything being brown and gray. This is a very ugly game to look at artistically, even for a realistic shooter. Sadly, there’s not much value in playing this first game today unless you want to be a Rainbow Six completionist or get an idea of how far the sequel came along. The campaign lasts about 4-5 hours, and then it’s over, leaving you frustrated and wishing there were more tactics to get through the game and die less. You won’t come away happy or inspired in any way. Most people won’t even get through the first level without dying 20 times due to the identity crisis of a Rainbow Six game trying to be Call of Duty.