Rainbow Six: Vegas

INTRODUCTION

In general, I am not a pure action games fan, at least not the common ones that throw me into an arena / jungle / castle / whatever, fill the place up with stupid enemies, let me choose between a variety of devastating weapons and just shoot in all directions killing anything that dares moving or breathing within a few meters from me. I mean, no matter how good the graphics are, it just gets boring after the first 3 minutes or so.

Don’t get me wrong. There are situations where I could enjoy such games but those are too few to mention. I need the game I am playing to challenge me in more than in one aspect. I’d like it to be intense, wise, use the environment to create interesting situations, be as realistic as a game can be. I am here to tell you I found such game, it goes by the name “Rainbow Six: Vegas”.

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What is Rainbow Six?

Rainbow is an international counter-terrorism organization hosted by NATO and saying it carries out the most top-secret missions and operations will be an understatement. The organization is consisted of two teams that operate all over the world according to threat priorities and scale. Rainbow Six is a well known and respected series of games that contributed a lot to the shooters genre, bringing some new approaches while defining a new sub-genre that we call “Tactical Shooter” these days.

The first two games of the series, Rainbow Six and Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear, along with their expansions packs, were developed by Red Storm Entertainment. The rest of the games in the series were developed and published by Ubisoft, who acquired Red Storm Entertainment. I guess I could say that Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six games are more action based and less tactical planning is needed in comparison to Red Storm’s ones, a fact that many gamers did not like…The first games made you plan ahead for hours before you even start the mission.

You could find yourself playing the same mission for several times, planning and finding the best and safest way to enter a room where hostages are being held. This could result in much frustration for the player and it took much patience and consistency to get it right. Also, you controlled up to 8 teammates armed with different weaponry and abilities while now your team consists only 3 people.

I must say that the moments that followed a successful mission back then brought much satisfaction and pride for you as the player and those moments made the game a huge success! Ubisoft replaced that tactical planning with more flowing action segments aiming to a wider audience and you know what, I am not sure it’s bad at all. In fact, it is great! One more fact I wanted to indicate is that Rainbow Six: Vegas was ported from the Xbox360 version. Usually, when porting from a console to the PC, the game is changed and many things are added / omitted in comparison to the original version. In this case, Ubisoft thought they had done a great job on the console and made the PC version identical. You know what? They were right!

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