General Tips

Use Your Scanner

Whether you have a heart scanner (Xbox) or motion sensor (PS2), you should get used to using it early and often. The scanners are one of the biggest gameplay changes to Rainbow Six: Lockdown, and can greatly ease your passage through the levels by giving you a heads-up on incoming enemies.

Although the scanners don't have a good battery charge on them, you can make up for this by simply not using them for too long at a time. All you need to do to ensure almost limitless use of the device is to pulse it; just tap the button, then tap it again. The wave will go across the screen once, lighting up any enemies in the area. If you need to see if any of them are moving, tap the button again, and see if any of the silhouettes have changed position. There's really no need to keep the device on for more than a second or two at a time if you use this method.

Shoot Through Materials

If you blast a few rounds through this door, this heartbeat will stop soon enough.

Keep in mind that most weapons will be able to punch through wooden doors and crates and hit enemies on the opposite side of the obstacle. This is true of most of the weapons in the game, save for the silenced weapons; they lack the requisite muzzle velocity to penetrate obstacles, so if you try to do so, you'll just wind up wasting ammo. If you have a high-powered weapon, though, you can get some cheap kills by firing through doors and even thin wooden walls.

Of course, you won't be able to actually see anything on the other side of these obstacles; that's where your scanner comes in. If you happen to use your scanner and pick up on someone standing still, then pop a few rounds at their silhouette through whatever obstacle lies between you. Depending on the type of obstacle, you might get lucky and land a hit or two.

Know Your Loadout

One of the good things about Lockdown is that you get to choose your weapon and grenade loadouts before each mission, although, if you don't want to, you can just go with whatever the game auto-selects for you. A bit of trial and error may be required before you happen across a weapon that's right for you, but you can always go through the first mission a few times, trying out different weapons, until you find something you like. As you'll note in the screenshots in this guide, we almost always went with the redoubtable P90, as it has a large clip size (helps to reduce the chance of having to reload during combat), decent accuracy, and great power. Although it's not super-precise when fired in single-shot mode, it can still kill people a good ways away if you fire in short bursts, especially if you have the default aim-helping online. If not, you may want to use an assault rifle, such as the G36C or the A59; these generally have better accuracy when fired in semi-automatic mode.

The OICW is big, to say the least.

Also note that you can unlock the formidable OICW when you get 250 Intel points, which will take two or three missions with the corresponding Intel Briefcases. Actually, it's not that formidable. It's not all that precise and doesn't seem to do all that much damage, and has less ammo than most weapons; you're better off with the P90 in most situations, although you may want to give your teammates OICWs. They won't be able to shoot any straighter, but at least your death squad will sound cooler when you're busting rounds.

Grenades are also configurable. We're cold, hard killers, so we usually went with eight frag grenades (you can assign them to both slots if you want), but you'll also have an assortment of other rounds to choose from, from flashbangs (useless) to stun grenades (mostly useless) to white phosphorous rounds (also mostly useless). Smoke grenades may be useful in some situations, such as in tight corridors, as it'll usually prevent enemies from shooting at you through the smoke, while you'll be able to see through the cloud with your heat vision. Breach charges can also be useful, especially if there are three or more enemies on the other side of a door. Frags are your best all-around grenade, as they have a decent radius of effect and are usually instant kills when an enemy is too close.

My Way Or The...Well, Just My Way

We don't mean to disparage the hard-working members of Chavez's team, but we hope it's not too insulting to speculate on what particular kind of illegal drugs they're smoking before they go out on a mission. Although the enemies you're facing off against aren't exactly marksmen, they also probably didn't spend a decade in training before being sent into the field. Your team members did, however, and they apparently have absolutely nothing to show for it, because they are terrible, horrible shots, on par with your average Star Wars stormtrooper. Couldn't hit the broad side of a barn if they were standing 20 feet away from it. On most missions, you're going to find that the average accuracy of your teammates will hover around five percent. Just thoroughly execrable at what they do, except when it comes to getting themselves shot. They're absolutely on the ball when it comes to taking a bullet or two.

So, yeah, get used to going through the bulk of each mission by yourself. Since you can actually aim your weapon at the enemies, you probably won't miss your teammates all that much, but you'll still want to bring them up to your position every now and again. Since it doesn't matter whether they die or not, save for the purposes of your after-mission score (they'll just magically reappear for your next mission), feel free to send them into rooms crowded with enemies as human target dummies, while you sit back and snipe away at enemies that take the bait.