Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas
Rating:  -
Its a good game for a console tactical shooter, i origionaly had this for xbox360, and it was fun, challenging and the graphics seemed great. I got it for pc, thinking it would be that much better, but its the exact same game, graphics and control system as console. its pretty obvious who the developers are advertising to now and days.. other than the fact that the pc version is obviously just an offspring of the console game, its challenging and fun, the ai gets repetative and sometimes doesn't initalize, so you have sitting targets..
if they'd put more time into gameplay it would be a good game, get it on console if you have the chance.
Rating: -
This is one of those games that I just don't like all that much, even though I really want to.
The setting of the game is great, and Las Vegas is presented in a great way. Some of the places you see are fictional, but overall, if you know Vegas, you will see a lot of familiar stuff. (Although mostly when you fly overhead in a helicopter. Once you are on the ground and enter Casinos, I guess it doesn't matter too much where you are and the Vegas flair doesn't help too much as you fight your way down the hallways).
What I don't like about this game is that it uses a checkpoint save system. And even as checkpoint systems go, this is among the worst. Checkpoints are few and far between. You may play for 20 minutes just to get killed by a single shot to the head and have to start over at the start of a mission. Argh! And the game crashes at times. I have had situations where the game crashed right after 20 minutes of unsaved play. Double-Argh!!!
It looks to me like the game is relatively short (which is OK with me) and they are just drawing it out with this frustrating and outdated mechanic (which is not OK with me).
In the end, I have to say that this means that I a more frustrated than entertained by this game. Shame.
Rating: -
I just don't get it anymore. Studios and gaming companies spend years and millions building these games, and they can't even put in a stinkin save system. OK, now thats off my chest.
Rainbow 6 Vegas is really a nice game. Pretty good gameplay, really good story in general, amazing scenery in the Las Vegas parts of the game, and in general, reasonably fun to play, albeit its somewhat short.
Now its almost completely ruined by consolitis. There is NO SAVE SYSTEM...., which means that you have to play the same scene 100 times over and over again until you figure out the tiny mystery that happens right BEFORE the next checkpoint. Some scenes, I wasted days on, over and over again. Totally maddening. Too bad really, as if there were just a simple quicksave system, it would have been much more tolerable.
The weapons reload method is somewhat novel, but generally dumb. There are huge supply crates all over and you walk up, the game kind of pauses, and you reload. Its agonizingly slow sometimes. Also, the walking speed is painfully slow as well. There is no running, nor jumping.
A couple of times I had to start an entire checkpoint over because I got stuck somewhere and simply could not get out. This of course happens in lots of games, but as there is no Jump function, when you get stuck, you get totally stuck.
All in all, I did like the game in general. But I'll wait for the sequel to be in the bargain bin before I waste any more money on a weak console port.
As many others have said, the lack of PC specific development for this game ruined it, as many other games have been ruined (Halo 2 comes to mind, as do dozens of others).
Rating:  -
A reviewer pointed out that this game was designed for console gaming and does not meet the usual complexity of games intended for the PC. I fully agree with that. Different than the older R6 games such as Rogue Spear, etc, you don't plan out your course anymore. You basically just shoot your way through, even stealth mean little in this game. The addition of the cover system completely defeats the need for stealth. You can run into a bunch of enemy, back up behind cover safely and just peek and shoot. The Halo like health system also made the game much easier. No longer will you be gimped for the rest of the level if you take a few hits. And you can take a lot more hits and recover fully again. So this completely destroys the R6 feel. And why not, R6 Vegas was not even created by the same people that did the previous R6 series.
So as said above, compared to previous R6 games, Vegas has completely lost the element of stealth, strategy, and difficulty. This does not mean it has more action, no. The game plays at an amazingly slow pace. For one you cannot even sprint or prone. You can walk, run or crouch you way through the game. Throwing away what made R6 series awesome, the new developers decided to retain one lame thing about R6 and made it 10 times worse. While the health system makes it so you can fully recover from anything, you still can't be out cover for long. That does not mean stealth is important. The enemies can know you are there, and most time they will just shoot at your direction. And here's when that annoying thing come in - if you go out of cover for too long, say, 3 seconds, you are gonna get killed - that's the only thing that feels like an R6 game... What this means is that you have to be behind cover constantly, at every turn and every corner, you will want to use the Cover action to stick your back against a wall or a crate or something. This makes the already slow-paced gameplay even slower. It pins players down to the same routine over and over: Run; Cover; Peek; Shoot; Reload...Repeat as need.
The game does offer different locations, but the above described cover system absolutely ruins any scenery differences the levels have. For the most part you will find your character facing toward you. You will stare at him in the face, and then the wall/crate/whatever behind him, and then a tiny part of the screen is devoted to whatever else that is going on. For the times when you actually do get to see the different settings, it is not at all great. For one the graphics suck. Vegas takes about 40 seconds on my computer to just start up - just going into the main menu screen, which I do not understand why. COD4 takes less than 1 second. There are further loading times after you select single player missions or multiplayer. And for all that loading, the game does not look impressive...at all. You can tell they tried to add a lot of colors, lightning effects and such. But the whole thing just doesn't look real. Your characters look like they are drawn by crayons, or watercolor painting or whatever. They just look washed out. Not tunning the graphics settings to the highest level can Vegas come even close to reaching the Photo-realism that COD4 can do by just having a medium video setting.
Of course, the two games run on very different graphic engines, but that doesn't give Vegas an excuse to suck so much on so many levels. It does not only lack action. It lacks difficulty, lack strategy, lacks stealth, and loses all of the Rainbow Six feel that its predessors have. The game takes about 10 hours to finish. But after a while you wonder why you are still playing it, and you realize that the only reason you wanted to beat it was because you paid 20 bucks for it. Face it, there wasn't a real story at all. The characters had no personality, and the voice acting sucked as well. You don't really learn anything about the character you control. COD4's 4 hour of the single player campaign told more about Soap and Cpt. Price, Gaz and Jackson, and delivers a whole lot of wows and woes than Vegas ever could dream of.
Now, the single player mode, as said, sucks. Unfortunately, the multiplayer part does not redeem itself either. The graphics look even worse online, and the whole system is not well designed. The cover system makes the servers plagued with campers, and with the developers trying to make this game as inaction oriented as possible, you just don't get the kind of gun fight fun you get in other games.
Seriously, the people who praised this game do not know what they are talking about. The only reason I took time to write this is because I don't want any more innocent people waste money on this game. It maybe a mediocre game on a console with its peek-a-shoot formula, but its shallowness and simplicity and lack of any narrative content whatsoever makes Vegas the worst PC game 2007 has seen. Rainbow Six: Vegas does not live to half the expectations that one would have for what used be a great and unique series on the PC. Now it's just a pile of cow poop.
Rating:  -
Rainbow Six Vegas is no doubt a good game. It is very well put together - good levels, good tactics, good overall design. The following are lists of the pros and cons:
Pros
1.)Tactics
2.)Level design
3.)Missions
4.)Story
5.)The views from the tops of buildings down onto the city of Las Vegas are very nice, and include accurate models of landmarks.
6.)Equipment/gun assortment
Cons
1.)You can't jump. This takes away a major part of realism.
2.)By defult, you are "running". Well, that is a walk speed, and the walk speed is so slow, that you might as well not even have the control.
3.)Even though there are generally two routes or more to take to get to an objective, I personally still felt like I was on a strictly set path. This takes away the exploration freedom that you get in a game like Crysis or even a little in Call of Duty 4. The "set path" feeling really ticked me off because I wanted to go explore Vegas after seeing all of those beautiful views!
Even though those things were taken away, I still had quite a bit of fun playing Rainbow Six Vegas. I would recommend it to the gamer who likes tactical missions and leading squads, but if you like to wander around the maps, explore, and you like to feel total realism such as jumping and running, this is not the game for you.
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