Fun...

It’s what you want when you buy a game.  Sure, graphics, sound, the attractiveness of the menus, all fairly important points but what everyone loves to beat around the bush about is, fun.  You essentially pay your hundred dollars for something that’s going to entertain you for a few hours.  If graphics are top of you’re list I suggest you go to see Happy Feet at the cinema, the animation and textures are superb.  It’s just the gameplay’s not up to much.  When it comes down to it Rainbow Six Vegas is fun; relatively attractive, nicely sounding fun.  Anything with Vegas in the title always is though right?  Just don’t hold me to that when Guy Sebastian gets desperate and releases ‘Guy’s Vegas Poker Bonanza’ on DVD.

For the first hour or so you’ll start off south of the border, in a Mexican town drenched in afternoon sun and tequila.  It begins with your routine ‘back to basics’ mission; a mission that you thought would last five minutes ends up overstaying its welcome and lasting, you guessed it, for over an hour.  Mexico doesn’t match up to Vegas in gambling and doesn’t match up to it in game environments.  You’ll get to grips with the intuitive play mechanics in five minutes and soon be craving the neon lights of The Strip, instead you’ll be shuffled along open environments that feel more akin to Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon, and because of that you end up feeling like your naked in a field surrounded by people with guns.  Prepare to play the past five to ten minutes again; the game doesn’t give out checkpoints too sparingly. 

The fun really starts when you hit Vegas.  Never was a town more made for ‘back to wall’ SWAT styled shooting.  Its slot machines make great use of the cover mechanic and somehow the game shuffling you along a more linear path actually benefits the gameplay experience, after all nothing really beats clearing a room with your team mates in less than a second.  Speaking of team mates the two men that you’re accompanied with are actually worth their weight in polygons.  On some occasions, given sufficient direction, for example the ‘tag an enemy’ feature, they can clear a room without you.  It’s a great feature that just helps you feel more in control of the situation and as a result immerses you in a tactical espionage world right out of this years Hollywood summer blockbusters.

As you work your way through the games five stages you’ll encounter random set pieces that somehow tie that plot together.  Although videogame plots aren’t necessarily renowned for their vivid storytelling, this really isn’t going to help matters.  Sure, it’s not the be-all-and-end-all for a game but when the soups this good it would be great to have the bread too.  And the worst part?  At the end you find a few hairs in the pool at the bottom of the bowl.  A looming thought crosses your mind, “if there’s that many hairs there, I must have just swallowed a cat”.  The experience is definitely soured.  I won’t ruin the looming ‘twist’ but in the vein of the Splinter Cell ending Ubisoft must have found a new word in the big book of storytelling.

So the single player was soured a little, but it didn’t really tarnish the last six to eight hours of gameplay.  The cherry on the cake however is the multiplayer.  Ubisoft have made great use of the increasingly popular LIVE service, a variety of game modes are available along with a player creation system that allows you to map your face onto your online alias via the newly released vision camera.  The action itself is good, the online code is fairly stable, but and it’s a fairly big ‘but’, a few players may find it hard to find that holy grail of servers.  For some reason every game that appears on the search menu heralds from the US of A.  And unless your connection speed is through the roof the game will be rendered unplayable.  Getting a good group of Australian players is a must and when you have your gang of shooters (in the nicest sense possible) the online part of Vegas is as entertaining and exhilarating as the single player.

Rainbow Six Vegas is a great shooter, and warrants a place just below the 360’s muscle bound group of Gears.  Thankfully, what happens in Vegas doesn’t always stay there...