Reviewed: January 13, 2007
Reviewed by: Mongoose

Publisher
Ubisoft

Developer
Ubisoft Montreal

Released: December 12, 2006
Genre: Tactical Shooter
Players: 1-2

8
8
8
5
7.8

System Requirements:

Sadly, for those looking to pick-up where your last PC Rainbow experience left off, you’ll be sorely disappointed. Vegas has a new vision for the franchise; a console vision where the PC version is little more than an afterthought, a port of the console that likely looks and plays better on your 50” HDTV than your 20” monitor. And lets face it, when a game plays better on your PC with a 360 controller plugged in, your PC gaming days are numbered.

Interestingly enough, ever since 9/11 the U.S. military has been planning and executing various scenarios in many major cities across the country just in case terrorists attack the homeland. I’ve been involved in the planning stages of several of these counter-terrorists strikes including scenarios for Las Vegas and the Hoover Dam, and I have to admit, I was impressed at how close Rainbow Six: Vegas actually played out to some of the scenarios already in place.

Previous Rainbow games have taken us all over the world, but nothing is more exhilarating than fighting in familiar territory, especially when that territory is the vibrant city of Las Vegas. Moving from burning car to burning car down Fremont street, sneaking along planters and going spine-to-the-wall against an information kiosk as you stalk terrorists along the Strip is a total rush, but nothing can prepare you for the thrill of scaling down the glass towers of high-rise hotels, and unloading a clip from your assault rifle into a slot machine and seeing the coins spill out.

Sin City has never been this much fun…

For the most part, Vegas returns us to the roots of the Rainbow franchise with numerous changes in gameplay, tactics, and control, and I can’t really find fault with any of them. The most notable change is the lack of a health bar. Vegas now uses a regenerative health system much like Call of Duty, where the screen turns red (and eventually black) as you take damage and die. This certainly takes the edge off the game, but can still be quite challenging on the harder difficulty settings.

Squad commands have been tweaked and refined to near-perfection. You can point at just about anything in the game and get a context-sensitive command cross. Point at a door and you can open it, or order your men to stack there in preparation for the next command with is either frag and clear, flash and clear, or just open the door with guns blazing. You can also point at the crack under the door and use your scope to recon the area, complete with various vision modes.

Now here is where things get really good and totally realistic. I can tell you from experience that you almost never make a frontal assault on the enemy. It’s all about distraction, flanking, and getting the advantage. To that end, almost ever room or area in Vegas has multiple entry points. Sure, it might not be totally realistic. In real life, we might have to blast a hole in a wall to create that secondary entrance, but Vegas gives us two or more doors or a skylight, or a window. Now comes the new trick.

While using your scope to recon the room beyond the door you can now lock in a primary and secondary target for priority attack. This means that when you order your men to breach they will target those men first. This is a great tool in cases where one terrorist might have a hostage at gunpoint and you need to take him out before he can pull the trigger. It also helps when you want to have you men enter via one access point while you come smashing through a skylight or kicking down the back door. When done properly you can kill all threats in about 2-3 seconds and never take any fire.

Of course, you and your men will eventually take damage, and while you are able to heal your men or better yet, order them to heal each other, they will not return the favor. This means that if you die you’ll have to restart from the last checkpoint. For a lot of players, this means you won’t be taking as many risks, and I even found myself using my men as bait. I could order them into a room and subject them to fire, comfort in the knowledge that I could heal them if they went down. This also made good tactics for drawing enemy fire to reveal their concealed locations so I could snipe them from my own safe vantage point.

I’ve never had any complaints with realism when it comes to weapons and gadgets. Vegas offers all the latest in declassified weaponry used by the guys who do this kind of stuff in real life. You are allowed two primary weapons and two types of grenades. From time to time you will come across a weapons drop where you can change your weapons and reload, but other than those rare crates, you are at the mercy of whatever weapons you can find lying around on dead terrorists.

The weapons are extremely accurate, not only in their visual appears, but also their performance and the various ways in which some of them can be modified with a silencer, scope, etc. Attaching a laser sight might look cool but it also gives the enemy a distinct advantage in locating you. You can also toggle the rate of fire from single shot, three-round burst, and full-auto, depending on how much you need to conserve ammo.

Gadgets are equally realistic with the standard snake scope, thermal and night vision goggles. There are maybe two instances in the game where you need the NVG but otherwise, the thermal is almost always the best option for detecting the heat signatures of enemies.

The tactical interface is flawless and totally intuitive. By aiming at an area or object and pressing a single button you can order your men to move, stack on a door, hack a computer, disarm a bomb, use a ladder, rappel down a building, or heal an injured man. You can order you men to go weapons free, infiltrate, assault, hold, or regroup on your position. And if you have a headset you can also use actual voice commands to issue most of these commands, adding a whole new level of realism and immersion.

Also new for Vegas is the cover system, which works a lot like Gears of War only you must actually hold down the let trigger to stick to the wall. Once stuck to the wall or even an object, you can peek around or over the top and fire from relative safety. You can even do a blind fire attack where you just aim the gun in the general direction and unload. Chances are you won’t kill anybody but you can cause them to retreat for cover allowing you or your men a quick moment to relocate.

The mission design for Vegas presents some very realistic challenges, some based dangerously close on scenarios the military has already considered. For most of these missions you only have two men at your command rather than three, but Walter and Park pretty much act as a single entity, which means no individual orders. It keeps things simple and even a bit realistic, since you are the senior officer and would never send grunts fresh from the academy out alone.

Levels range from the wide-open areas of the Vegas Strip to the top of the Hoover Dam. Missions will also take you inside stunning hotels, casinos, and even a massive theater with multi-tiered balconies, stage, catwalk system, and a mounted machine gun turret. There is a very cool level where you fight inside the new construction of Dante’s Casino, although I found it a bit unrealistic that a building, which was nothing more than a structural skeleton had working slot machines inside. And all things culminate at the Hoover Dam for a very exciting finale that leaves several questions open for the obvious sequel to answer.

For those looking to share their Vegas vacation, the game offers a full cooperative online mode for up to four players. This is about as real as it gets to actually enlisting in the military and training for 4-6 years. Nothing comes close to the realism of coordinating your attacks with real players using your headset. No longer are you confined by the AI of the game – not that it is bad by any means, but nothing can replace a real human holding the controller.

There is a new mode called Terrorist hunt where 50 terrorists are out to get you and you must get them first. But for those looking for the ultimate challenge, check out the Versus mode featuring 10 maps (plus 10 bonus maps) that are quite large and perfectly suited for up to 16 players. Go head to head in locations like Mexico, the casino, the Hoover Dam and many others. The multiplayer package is rounded out with classic modes like Sharpshooter, Survival, Retrieval, Attack and Defend, and team versions of many of these modes. Attack and Defend is by far the best of these modes in my opinion, as you must not only recover a package, but also return it to the extraction point. It’s the ultimate CTF that requires smooth and precise teamwork.

The default keyboard layout is odd and even problematic, but you can reassign the keys to make more sense. Of course your best option is to install the patch that allows the use of your 360 gamepad and things get infinitely more intuitive – clear evidence that this was a console game by design and ported to the PC as an afterthought.

The game levels are massive and highly detailed with working slot machines, video monitors, flashing lights, neon, and even cars and trucks spinning on their prize pedestals. The initial flyover of Vegas is jaw dropping, as is your insertion flight onto the Hoover Dam.

Expect plenty of explosions from bombs, flash bangs, and frag grenades. The effect of the flash bang is about as close to reality as a video game can offer; only the recovery time is a bit longer in the real world. But having the current image burned into your retina and having to stumble around blindly is spot on, although the bang could be louder.

There are also nice smoke and particle effects and some of the most stunning lighting I’ve seen this year in a game. Many of the levels play out in darkness if for no other reason than to use your NVG and thermal goggles, both of which produce realistic vision effects.

Depending on your system specs you might find yourself tweaking options for quite some time to get a smooth and reliable framerate. The first thing to go is the shadows, which seemed to produce the most drain on my system. Removing or at least lowering the shadow quality netted the most improvement without taking away from any of the more important visual elements.

And while Vegas supports numerous resolutions, there is no widescreen aspect ratio modes, so if you are playing on a 16:9 monitor (like me) you’ll have to stretch (and slightly distort) the image or suffer with black bars on the side. I seriously hope this is not indicative of future PC games that make use of the Unreal 3 engine.

There is a lot of speech in Vegas, mostly from Joanna giving you updates and mission briefs from the safety of her chopper orbiting the city. From time to time you will get a TV broadcast in your PIP and you can expect a lot of realistic chatter from your men as they verbally confirm your orders and relay their status. Some of the best dialogue is purely for fun and can be heard as you eavesdrop on unsuspecting terrorists as they chat about anything and everything.

Sound effects are extremely details from footsteps crunching on broken glass to the sound of that glass shattering as you come through a window feet-first. Every single gun and grenade effect is perfect. I can only assume the sound designers got to fire or at least record these weapons being fired. And it all comes together in a fantastic Dolby Digital surround mix assuming you have a card that supports Dolby. But even the standard EAX mix is good stuff.

The PC version of Vegas packs in the same multiplayer content as the consoles and even manages to maintain smooth framerates by seriously scaling down the visuals, but there are serious connectivity issues that need to be addressed and patched immediately. Assuming you can even get into a game – since accessing the gamer servers screen is enough to drop you to the desktop – you’ll be lucky to finish a complete match. You’ll either experience some random gameplay or graphics glitch or be unceremoniously deposited back to your desktop.

There are numerous other problems like patiently waiting in the lobby for the game to start then coming in as a spectator ONLY. And playing co-op missions is problematic at best when you have to rely on third party options for voice communications. Simply put, the multiplayer is broke on the PC, which is sad because multiplayer is one of the strongest selling points for this game on the console.

If you have any of the next-gen consoles then by all means grab Vegas and play it until your hands cramp up, but avoid the PC version at all costs. The solo game is identical to the console, plays best with a gamepad, and will likely require enough costly hardware upgrades that you may as well buy a 360 and the better version of the game.