Once the premiere member of Ubisoft's Tom Clancy lineup, the Rainbow Six franchise has fallen out of favor over the last few years, due in no small part to the misguided direction and disappointing quality of the last two games in the series. With the move into the next generation, Ubisoft is making a concerted effort to restore the franchise’s lost luster and bring back the intense, tactical action that once defined the Rainbow Six experience. The gameplay balance has been refocused back toward methodical room clearing and precise squad maneuvers, highlighted by thrilling flashes of combat in which the difference between life and death comes down to a few seconds and less than a handful of bullets. Rainbow Six Vegas borrows several of the best elements from the excellent Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, enhances them and introduces a host of impressive gameplay features, all of which come together flawlessly and take the genre to the next level. Multilayer is similarly impressive, as players not only have a wealth of options for adversarial play, but also the ability to team-up with up to three buddies over Xbox Live and cooperatively play through the campaign mode. Rainbow Six Vegas marks a masterful return to form for the franchise and despite a few minor annoyances, stands as one of the best tactical shooters ever made.


Story

Whereas the single-player campaigns found in previous Rainbow Six titles were little more than collections of disjointed missions tied together with only the thinnest threads of continuity, Ubisoft has created a cohesive storyline to push the action in Rainbow Six Vegas forward. Players suit up as Logan Keller, an all-around badass and the leader of a new, streamlined 3-man Rainbow squad that also includes demolitions wizard Mike Walter, and recon expert Mark Jung. Supporting non-playable characters include Joanna Torres, who feeds the team intel over coms, and Ding Chavez, the former leader of the Rainbow Six team who now serves as the commander of the entire Rainbow anti-terrorist program. The game opens in the town of San Joshua del Mosquiera, Mexico, with the Rainbow Six team hot on the trail of Irena Morales, an international terrorist that has been setting off red flags in her efforts of amassing a militant force inside US borders. The mission inevitably goes south and Morales escapes, but not before the revelation that a massive, simultaneous attack on multiple Las Vegas landmarks is about to take place. Obviously, protecting the city and dismantling the terrorist operation immediately become top priority, and Team Rainbow is given a one-way ticket to Sin City to resolve the situation.

The mere presence of a coherent storyline is a welcome improvement over previous Rainbow Six titles, even if its only been pulled off well enough to provide a half-decent reason for players to start shooting up the Las Vegas strip. As was the case with Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, Ubisoft seems to have put a great deal of effort into trying to foster connections between the player and the main characters in Rainbow Six Vegas, likely in hopes of building up the same kind of franchise identity that the Splinter Cell series has long enjoyed. There are obvious attempts at character development littered throughout the dialog, but none of these hints of depth are ever sufficiently explored for any kind of emotional investment to be made. At the conclusion of the single-player campaign, players will most likely walk away from the members of Team Rainbow with a longing to get to know them better, which they'll more than likely have the opportunity to do given the game's woefully anti-climactic cliffhanger ending. Furthermore, most of the plot twists over the course of the game were woefully predictable since many of them were incredibly similar to those found in other recent Tom Clancy titles.

The presentation certainly helps make up for the lack of depth and imagination however, as mission briefings are delivered in-flight during the chopper-rides from one point of the city to the other, and breaking information is provided mid-mission over comms, via overheard conversations, and through real-time scripted events, all witnessed from the standard first-person viewpoint. As a result, the entire affair proceeds fluidly from one mission or plot point to the next, which helps to establish and maintain a sense of continuity within the game world. Players are never ripped out of the experience by the appearance of a pre-mission planning screen or a shift in perspective for the sake of a cinematic sequence.


Gameplay

Comparisons between the gameplay offered by Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter and Rainbow Six Vegas are inevitable given both games are realistic squad shooters from Ubisoft and therefore feature similar gameplay fundamentals, but the truth of the matter is that the two franchises provide dramatically different experiences in modern combat. Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter was a systematic assault through miles of hostile territory and players were forced to use the layout of the environment to their advantage in order to gain the upper hand in epic mid-to-long range fire-fights that generally involved masses of enemies and armored vehicles. For the most part, players were forced to react to the huge enemy engagements that the game threw at them and issue general squad commands in the heat of battle, rather than being given any opportunity to plan for upcoming encounters. In contrast, Rainbow Six Vegas takes the player into far more confined spaces and presents them with incredibly delicate combat situations that must be resolved with short, intense bursts of close-quarters combat. Furthermore, the pace of the game is methodical enough to provide the player with enough time to put sufficient thought into setting up complex squad maneuvers such as breach-and-clears. Anyone expecting Rainbow Six Vegas to provide more of the same gameplay found in Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter is in for a rude awakening.