I've been waiting for so long for a game like this to show up, since Delta Force: Black Hawk Down.
Graphics: 8
Sound: 8
Value: 9
Tilt: 8
- The Good:
Nice visuals, New tactical gameplay, and an intense atmosphere.
- The Bad:
Graphical Issues on some systems, Guys swarming on you sometimes seems out of it's place (Playin' on Realistic difficulty).
Rainbow Six: Vegas introduces a game mechanic which I call "hide and seek", not many games have used this kind of gameplay.
In this game you have the option to take cover at a press of a button, you can take cover behind any still object, from there you can peek on the corners or get up and shoot above the object covering you (if it's lower than your hight of course), if you get to the end of a wall, for instance, you can put your gun out and shoot blindly at the target, which means you don't expose your head or most of your body. This kind of gameplay brings new tactics to this kind of action games. And this is one of the strong points of Rainbow Six: Vegas.
Another thing is that you cannot save, the game has it's own check points for you. So it is a bit annoying at first, but if you keep up the pace you can get the hang of it and succeed where you have failed before.
The check point saving system is in a way better than traditional saving, because here you are always on your toes - nothing can go wrong, or else you are in jeopardy.
This system helps getting into the feel of "here and now", instead of "before and after" where you could just save at any point and go back to any saved game anytime, which again takes out the "live action" feeling.
The health system is similar to the COD2 one's. Well, first of all, The best part of this system is there are no medipacks or "food" or something in that fashion, there are however painkillers which are not collect-ables and are used more as an ability.
When you get hit you will lose your focus for a few moments, the screen will get blurry, and you will need to wait a moment before continuing on. You don't actually use a painkiller on yourself, you may however use it on teammates to revive them, but your fellow teammates cannot rivive you if you get shot down.
At some points of the game you'll need to wait for your crew members to hack something and in the meanwhile you'll need to defend them against swarming tangos, which sometimes (Playing on realistic difficulty) feels out of place.
Rainbow Six: Vegas isn't like the other Rainbow Six games, it introduces new gameplay tactics, and takes out the somewhat boring mechanic that was used in previous Rainbow Six games, like the map planing, where before you'd plan ahead the path of your team and the path of the other teams on the virtual map - but not in this game, in here you simply make your way through, you do have a map to bring up anytime you like while on site but there is no virtual map to plan ahead on and there are no other teams, it's only your team, which consists of two extra members aside from you of corse.
The animations on the guys have been captured by real fighters and simply look awesome.
Rainbow Six Vegas is a nice looking game, though there are no advanced graphical options to adjust, it looks pretty with all that blurish effect.
The game suffers from a graphical shadow problem apparently on my eVGA nVidia 8800GTS 640MB, Vista system. But it's not something that will stop you from playing it.
The music is exactly how it should sound, intense dramatic music usually sets the mood in Rainbow Six Vegas.
The sound effects also sound great, just as it should be.
To sum up, If you like action, lots of action, you will get it here in Vegas.