Welcome to Modojo, 
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas Review
Written by Elmer Concepcion on Monday, July 23, 2007
Cover system from consoles is retained; Potentially robust online component.
Dull and stiff gameplay; Worst graphics in a game ever to carry the Unreal Technology logo; Death animations frequently pause the action as they load; No one's playing online.
When I handled the preview quite some time ago, I assumed that Rainbow Six: Vegas for the PSP would take place somewhere in Las Vegas. I'm not just talking about the general vicinity of Las Vegas. I'm talking about the lights and the slots and the roulette wheels and the show girls; you know, the place were Elvis reigned king. To my surprise, there's very little Vegas to be had on this UMD. We've got a Villa somewhere, an airport, and a dam that you go to. But there's none of the glitz or glamor or pizazz that you expect. All of that famous strip that you see appears in pre-rendered cutscenes, often finding your two man team flying over Vegas in flames. And every time I see those cutscenes, I'm longingly reminded of the other game which bears the same name. This edition fails to live up to its senior in nearly every possible way.
It's not that the PSP is incapable of fast paced anti-terrorist combat. Metal Gear, Syphon Filter, and SOCOM all proved that to great effect. And it's not as if the developers of Rainbow Six didn't learn from the best of them what the fundamentals of good shooter controls on the PSP are. Your analog nub moves, the face buttons aim, lock on with L and fire with R, etcetera. The trouble here is that there seems to be a distinctly sluggish response from pressing the button and what happens on screen, if there's a response at all. Try to snap to a wall for cover and you could find yourself flicking the analog nub over and over again as you're shot to pieces. Equally frustrating is trying to pop out of cover to get a shot off accurately. Your soldier is far too slow on the uptake to reliably pick off any target that's moving. The lock on should help with the aiming, but it seems whenever it's used your agent's accuracy practically reduces to zero making the function ultimately useless. Sure, sniping works, but the terrorists have to like standing still in the open for long periods of time.
While we're on the subject, the AI featured here isn't exactly ready for their SATs. Though most times they're moving on their predetermined paths completely unaware of the firefight that just happened in the next room, they can be surprisingly aggressive. On a few occasions, I have been rushed by a few of the braver ones who caught me with my pants down. I was in snake camera mode and by the time I could put it down, I was already quite dead. Once the enemy is alert, you'll sometimes have to do your best to keep them more afraid of you than you are of them. Let up on the return fire, and it's not uncommon to find yourself flanked by more than you can handle by your lonesome.
Don't let their occasional tenacity fool you, they can also be equally dumb at times. I had at one time, perhaps approaching the door too quickly, alerted the terrorist on the other side. I saw him turn to open the door via the snake camera I had just put on. Trying to quickly escape it and prepare for the gunfight, somehow I end up sticking myself to the wall beside the door frame. Before I could un-stick, (sluggish controls, ya know) I hear him yell, "Aww crap!" Yes, that's what he said that as he points his gun at me. But without wasting a breath, he turns around proclaiming aloud, "It's all back to normal." I ponder this event for a few seconds, then shoot him in the back of the head. The game stutters a bit as it needed to load his death animation. He then falls over and his body unceremoniously fades away. Between the two polar extremes of their AI, they unfortunately tend to be on the idiot side of things and fighting cowardly dumb AI is really just a mind-numbingly joyless exercise.
If dumb AI and sluggish controls were the only problem, then it could've been a somewhat passable if dull game. But then a number of other problems arise, not the least of them is the fact that you can't pick up ammo or weapons from anywhere in the game. The bad guys disappear, and their guns with them apparently. You've got a considerable amount of ammo but if that's ever gone before the mission is over, you're quite screwed. Same with your health, which if it's half depleted or more since your last checkpoint will leave most any subsequent retries pointless. Mostly you're running about on your own, but to give the illusion of squad combat every now and then your partner will come under fire and require your help. I wouldn't complain if during those scenes your partner would actually fight the terrorists with you. As it turns out, you've got to take out every single one of them by yourself or your partner will just eventually die. It's particularly annoying when the last remaining baddie is obscured from sight.
I feel I need to say something about the multiplayer. Well, ya know what, It's there. It looks like it's got a good lobby and it even has stats tracking and everything. But at any given time I've tried to play online, I've found no more than 4 or 5 people in all the servers available. And when I attempt to join, it fails to even connect to those meager games. Looking at the rankings, I can get a startling look at the population that had played. Admittedly, I'm coming in rather late after its release but upon registering I'm roughly the 5000th ranked player online. Getting a good look at each players playtime measured in minutes, you'll find that much of that small number have played for a startling 0 minutes online. If the population is this low now, I don't think I'm to do anything to encourage it's growth.
The elements are there, that it might have been a great game. The control scheme is ripped from the best of them, and there are plenty of terrorists to take out again and again. And I've gotta give them props for attempting to make a brand new story and campaign parallel to the console title. Either this was their idea of giving something new to owners of the console version, or this was a concession they felt had to be made to the tiny disc. Whatever the reason in the end, for what Ubisoft is offering it's 40 bucks in the pot that you're not gonna get back. What you are getting is a grave magnitude of repeating hallways, a dull story with often dull witted opponents, mucked up controls, and a game missing many key abilities from the 360 or PS3 editions. Rappelling down the sides of buildings is out, you're no longer guiding a squad of elite special forces but playing a single man too slow to ever be one, and then of all things there's a distinct lack of Vegas to be found in the game! Keep your money and get your chips somewhere else.
