Rainbow Six: Lockdown Updated Hands-On

Combat Vehicles

Four players secure a parking garage in this clip.

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During a recent visit with Ubisoft we had the opportunity to get hands-on with the latest PlayStation 2 and Xbox versions of Rainbow Six: Lockdown. Currently scheduled for release in September, Rainbow Six: Lockdown is a Tom Clancy-inspired, squad-based shooter in which you'll wage war on terrorists as part of the elite Team Rainbow. It's a very different-looking team from what you'll be used to if you're a fan of the Rainbow Six series, because your colleagues now have distinct appearances and personalities. Whether or not you'll care about your CPU colleagues in the single-player game now that they have some character remains to be seen, however, and we're still finding ourselves giving into the temptation to just employ them as meat shields (sending them into any potentially dangerous situation ahead of us).

We played through three campaign missions on this occasion, including the campaign mode's first mission, which we completed alongside three other players rather than with CPU squadmates. There were several options available to us before we attempted the cooperative mission, including whether or not our performance would contribute to our rankings, whether the players that were killed would have the ability to respawn, which difficulty level we wanted to play on, and whether we'd like to attempt the mission against a time limit. Once we'd settled on all of that stuff, each player was able to pick out primary and secondary weapons, as well as two grenade types or gadgets for themselves. Needless to say, the most successful teams look certain to be those who communicate with each other before even getting into the level, since four players all armed with the same weapons will certainly have a harder time than a team with varied capabilities.

There are plenty of places for you to take cover in the first mission's parking garage.

The start of the mission saw our team getting dropped onto the roof of a multistory parking garage by a helicopter, and it didn't take long for a number of enemies to come see what all the noise was about. Our primary objective at this point was simply to exit the parking garage, which meant fighting our way through dimly lit areas and down narrow stairwells all the way to the bottom. There were plenty of parked cars for us to hide behind when we encountered enemies, and we were pleased to see that the opposition was smart enough to try to shoot us through the vehicles' windows when they were able to see us through them. Note to self: hiding behind glass doesn't work.

The upper stories of the garage were quite well lit for the most part, which meant that we had very little use for our night vision or thermal vision until we got farther down. As we neared the bottom of the garage, the whole place became a lot darker, and the night vision goggles definitely came in handy. The parking garage was one of the few areas that we played through on both the PS2 and Xbox, incidentally, and while the Xbox game's lighting was undoubtedly more impressive, the PS2 game didn't look shabby by any means. The main difference on this occasion was that we chose to play one version with the assisted aim feature (which draws glowing boxes around all of the enemies on the screen, often long before you spot them) turned on, and the other with it disabled. We discovered that the assisted aim made the dimly lit parking garage a lot easier to negotiate than we would've liked, in all honesty, although it's likely we were playing on one of the game's less-challenging difficulty settings. Without the assisted aim turned on, locating enemies was every bit as challenging as shooting them at times. Although, on our second play-through the CPU characters we were teamed up with appeared to have no difficulty seeing in the dark whatsoever.

Without night vision, many locations in Rainbow Six: Lockdown would be difficult to navigate.

Strangely, enemies will be easier to find in the dark in the Xbox version of Rainbow Six: Lockdown than their PS2 counterparts. This is because, in addition to thermal vision and night vision, Xbox players will have access to a heartbeat monitor gadget. The heartbeat monitor has the appearance of a red line sweeping across your visor, displaying any enemies within range (regardless of whether or not they're behind walls) as red silhouettes and adding red dots to a small radar on your screen. It's essentially a more powerful version of the thermal vision, which is presumably why Ubisoft felt it necessary to give it a very limited (but quickly rechargeable) battery life.