Ubisoft saw the writing on the wall a couple of years ago; while people love sequels, they don’t love being reminded that they love sequels. They dropped the numerical sequel before EA had even considered it, and they invented the diabolical sub-subtitle with games like Far Cry Instincts Predator, which confuse even veterans like myself as to where colons and hyphens are supposed to go. Realizing that if I can’t work it out the general public has no chance in hell, they’ve simplified things a little and gone down the Jerry Bruckheimer road with their venerable Rainbow Six series: we’re going by cities now.

Rainbow Six Vegas, no doubt the first in a planned trilogy with Miami and New York and possibly a Criminal Intent thrown in for good measure, is the latest outing for the Rainbow team. Previous protagonist Ding Chavez is now the boss, and you assume the role of bad-ass Logan Keller, and an all-new, smaller team of global gladiators hailing from Korea, the UK and the Americas. As the name implies, rather than jet-setting from hot-spot to hot-spot, the action in this fifth instalment is centred very much on Nevada’s Sin City, a most wretched hive of scum and villainy…unless you like gambling, seedy strip clubs, and in this case, high-powered weaponry and terminating terrorists.

So far Ubisoft have been coy about exactly who the terrorists in question are and what their motivations are, but what we do know is that your mission, while based solely in Las Vegas, will be affected by events taking place further afield. Conspiracy theorists may posit that the lack of information may have something to do with a planned crossover with Splinter Cell: Double Agent’s nasties, John Brown’s Army. It’s not that wild a theory; Ubisoft have done clever little crossovers like this in the past, and from what we’ve seen of Rainbow Six Vegas, the bad-guys seem to be of the home-grown variety, rather than some nefarious foreign operatives.

Either way, the change of focus from global to local marks an interesting shift for the Rainbow Six series, and it seems like one for the better. Rather than receiving disjointed mission-briefings and being sent to far-flung, one-off locations, Rainbow Six Vegas keeps you deep in the action by briefing you in-game via voice and video transmissions in your HUD, ala Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. Nor are they your usual dry briefings when the coast is clear; at the climax of the mission we saw, Keller and his team had just rescued a reporter who was about to be executed – live on TV courtesy of the camera she was carrying – but rather than a nice Mission Completed announcement, our operator started shouting into our headset that we’d stirred up the hornet’s nest, and ten seconds later doors were kicked in and terrorists were pouring in, guns blazing.

It’s a level of intensity that, while present to a degree in previous games, has been turned up to full blast for Rainbow Six Vegas. The fact that the entire game takes place over the course of one day and night invites the obvious comparisons to TV’s 24, but Jack Bauer has nothing on Team Rainbow! Nor do his tactics even come close to the slick strategies present in Rainbow Six Vegas. Managing your squad is just as important as ever, and while the game is more Hollywood that previous iterations, charging out into the open guns blazing is still a sure-fire way to get yourself killed. So Ubisoft Montreal has given players a variety of new commands and techniques to give them the edge of the bad-guys, and the coolest would have to be the new Tag function.

The example we saw had Keller crouched beneath a nice large window looking into an office. Inside we could see three hostiles, and with the new Tag command, we could allocate two of them to our squad-mates and keep one for ourselves. Then, when the breach-and-clear command was issued, our AI offsiders took down the marks they were allocated, allowing us to drop #3 after we smashed the window. It’s a very cool technique that should allow veterans to masterfully execute attacks. For the rest of us however, we now have the wonderful ability of hiding behind cover, and just raising our weapons over the top and blindly firing in the vague direction of enemies. Who knows, you might get lucky and hit something without ever exposing yourself to danger, or you can just use it as suppressing fire while your partners in anti-crime do all the hard work!

Speaking of work, Ubisoft Montreal has done an amazing job of making Rainbow Six Vegas look like, well, Vegas! The visuals are incredible, easily on par with GRAW. Obviously you won’t be tearing through any real-world casinos and blowing them to pieces, but there are a number of real world locations present like the Strip, and when you’re flying in via chopper at the start, it looks like you could easily be part of the camera-crew filming those location-montage snippets for CSI. But it’s not just the big things that catch your eye, the small details are really what sucks you into the game. Check out Keller’s gloved arm when he’s making impressive military gestures to his team-mates and you can see the fine details of the leather on his gloves. Have a look at a pile of pipes waiting to be used on the construction site, and you can actually look through them right to the other side…and shoot down there too!

Rainbow Six Vegas is shaping up to be the Chaos Theory of the Rainbow Six franchise: even if you didn’t like the previous games, the increased action and blockbuster feel mean that this is one game worth checking out. It seems like there’s still enough tactical and squad-based gameplay for veteran fans to enjoy too, but the game is clearly designed to open the series up to a wider audience...although there’s no roulette mini-games that we could see. We didn’t get to see any multiplayer action unfortunately, but you can bet that Ubisoft won’t let fans down in this regard when the game is released in November.

Article by Dominic Rozenberg