Gameplay
The old Rainbow Six games were tactical shooters, similar to SWAT 4, only even more involved. Rainbow Six Vegas is much more similar to Gears of War, and to that extent has a good cover system. You press the right mouse button to glue yourself to whatever you're standing next to. Like most games with cover, it's got instances where you are shot from seemingly impossible angles, funky doors that don't let you peek around them, and all that stuff.
The shooting is also fairly standard, with way more guns than any normal person (even a gamer!) cares about. The shooting works fine and is satisfying. It's the getting shot that's the problem.
Basically R6V uses a randomizer for AI aiming. Sometimes three guys will shoot at you for five seconds and maybe get one graze. Sometimes one guy will shoot you with a three round burst from forty meters away and you'll die instantly. It encourages cautious play and using tactics, but a lot of the deaths I suffered felt "cheap".
And when the player dies, it's game over. When your buddies die, you just have to revive them (usually). This means that the most effective strategy is to use them like a hat on a stick, sending them in to draw fire so you can pick off the enemies from relative safety.
The AI doesn't just shoot at you, though. It also uses grenades. It uses them fairly well, and there is generally no warning. The AI has a number of audio barks, but they never seem to trigger at the right times. Many times an enemy would yell "eat this" or some similar grenade throwing bark with no follow up. Many times I would simply explode with no warning (not even the sound of the grenade hitting the ground). My favorite was when I was behind a low wall, under fire. The enemy was pouring it on. I crawled down to the far end of the wall to get a better shot, watching the enemy fire on my original position the whole time. Then the enemy threw a grenade... directly at me. That's a bug, folks. But it wasn't the worst but in R6V by far.
The game has a lot of bugs. Before I downgraded to older video card drivers, the game would crash and reboot my PC. I encountered objectives that didn't spawn, enemies that would yell the same audio barks for twenty seconds straight, and doors that were supposed to open but didn't. I had to backtrack and move a barrel my AI squaddie got stuck behind. Basically, it's got all the hallmarks of a crappy PC port.
Well, that's not completely fair. While I was looking online, even 360 owners were complaining about lock ups and multiplayer instability, but the game got good reviews by and large, so I'm assuming it wasn't nearly as buggy as what I played.
Theatrics
While Tom Clancy's name is on the box, I don't think he had anything to do with the story. I'm not saying I'm a Clancy fan to begin with, but the movies I've seen based on his books didn't bore me like R6V. Of course, part of that has to do with the gameplay. All the ranting the main character does about loyalty seems pretty stupid when the game encourages you to treat your men like human mine detectors.
Aesthetics
For the most part, the game looks good. I'd heard it was really beautiful, and I think that was slight hyperbole based on it being early in the 360's lifespan. It has some sections with really mottled colors, as though the game was playing in 16 bit color.
That might have been because I'd turned some detail settings down to get the game to crash less often, but it doesn't really matter how good your graphics are when they're rendering this.
Final Score
2 of 5
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