First Play — Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas — Completed Chinese Restaurant

I possess a well researched dislike for the long running Tom Clancy series of video games for exceedingly good political reasons. The games glorify the shoot first and ask questions later mentality of Special Forces tactics, while grossly misrepresenting the individuals being shot. For example, the “terrorists” always seem to have some huge underground facility or warehouse, stocked full of technology that would cause the DOD to weep tears of envy: they’ve got motion sensors, infrared vision, flash bangs, iris scanning locks, server rooms, satellite telemetry, and of course, nuclear weapons. I suppose a couple guys armed with a garage full of fertilizer and fervent religious discussion wouldn’t make for a very exciting game.

After nearly everyone on the planet had recommended Rainbow Six Vegas to me, I finally gave it a rent. Despite the layers of obvious recruitment propaganda going on here, I found myself hooked. I didn’t even have to squint real hard and pretend I was shooting Combine Soldiers. Single player Vegas is quite simply the king of shooters. Forget barging into a room with guns blazing, leaping over bullets and obstacles like a deranged bunny rabbit. Logan Keller, leader of Black Ops team Rainbow Six, knows his tactics. Vegas is all about the slow and stealthy hunt, and for once has the artificial intelligence to back up the premise.

The biggest problem with AI characters has traditionally been the simple process of navigating obstacles. I’ve seen AI characters trying to walk through walls, jogging unnaturally in place, moon walking, standing half inside of objects, happily waltzing into my kill zone, or blissfully shooting me in the face. Almost all of these problems have vanished in Vegas. The first time my squadmate, Gabriel, asked me to move out of the way so he could get through a tight spot, chills went up my spine, but this was only the beginning of a series of revolutions in Rainbow Six’s AI.

I can issue commands to my squad simply by looking at a piece of cover and pressing the A button. Gabriel and Kan take care of the rest, including providing each other covering fire on the way to their objective and stacking up intelligently when they get there. For instance, if I’ve foolishly sent them to a piece of cover that is too small for both of them, one of my team will automatically find another piece of nearby cover or crouch directly behind the first arrival. I can also order my squad to regroup, hold position, or alter their tactics between shooting on sight and only firing when fired upon. Gabriel and Kan also speak back to me over the radio, letting me know when they’ve lost site of a target, or when they see someone trying to flank us

My squad’s AI also has a whole slew of options for entering rooms. Since Vegas often has me rescuing civilian hostages, nonsplattering ways of opening doors are often the best. If a particular room has two entry points then things begin to get interesting. Since my squad and I are in constant radio contact, I can set them up at one door while I flank around to a different door. I order them to toss in a flashbang over the radio, and then I pop my head in to finish off any stragglers and free the hostages.

Unfortunately, the enemy AI is drawing from the same bag of tricks as my squadmates and can be very difficult to take down. Hunkering down in some thick cover may seem like a good idea at first, but after I was cleverly outflanked a few times while being distracted by a decoy, it didn’t seem so wise. The enemy characters are also very good at hiding. Discovering where fire is coming from is half the battle in Vegas.

No discussion of an Unreal 3 engine game would be complete without mentioning the graphics, especially since I was rather cruel to the Vegas demo’s capabilities. I’m happy to report that the Vegas engine has seen significant improvement since the demo. Framerates are now solid. Mipmap lines are much less prominent, and shadow detail has greatly improved. More importantly, this game oozes with graphical style. Going with Vegas as the game’s primary location has allowed Ubisoft to insert loving hints of the surreal. My favorite moment, walking upstairs in the Chinese restaurant and staring for a full minute at the huge ornamental dragons spitting confetti out onto the gambling floor. High dynamic range lighting is also used to excellent effect. Aside from a couple of areas with washed out contrast in Mexico, I can’t think of a single graphical complaint.

In addition to the clever single player AI mode, you can also chose to tackle the Vegas campaign with a friend in local cooperative mode or with three friends over Xbox Live. Unfortunately, the Vegas coop mode feels like a completely unfinished tack on. First, entering a coop game requires you to pick the levels you want manually; there is no option to simply progress through to the next level automatically. And then there is the missing story. No, I’m not talking about a tactfully edited version of the single player game. Vegas’ story advancing scenes are still in the game; however, they are missing all the sound and video portions. Not only is this incredibly confusing; it’s also insanely boring to sit through long unskippable portions, where characters are essentially staring at each other. (Extra points if you invent your own sentimental dialog during these portions.) Finally, coop mode is also missing the checkpoint system, meaning that you have to start each level over from the beginning if you die. It is possible to extract fun from coop despite all of these issues, but it is a process akin to chipping out ram chips from a stone.

In a lot of ways, Vegas is a B grade game. For example, the way that all the characters wrists bend completely unnaturally when holding their weapons, or the glaring problems with cooperative play. However, these are all mistakes of execution. Rainbow Six Vegas contains no mistakes of design. Every corridor, every back alley, every blackjack table is laden with strategic possibility. If you need me, I’ll be crouched behind that slot machine over there, quarters running down the back of my shirt like rain.