I have only ever played one Tom Clancy game before today. That was the original Splinter Cell on the PC, and I only played that once. I quickly decided that all that sneaking about wasn't for me, and since then I haven't so much as looked at a Tom Clancy game. So that makes today's choice particularly interesting to me... what on Earth is going on in Tom Clancy's world today, I wonder?
Rainbow Six Vegas is, apparently, a tactical squad-based first person shooter. I say "apparently", because in all the time I played the game I never got far enough to find that out.
Seriously.
Wow. This bit looks awesome. Pity I didn't get to play it.
The game starts with you being dropped from a helicopter into a terrorist-infested part of a Mexican border town. You have to fight your way through the town to regroup with your team. Why you couldn't have just been dropped off where your team was is beyond me, but then I guess you wouldn't have had an introductory level.
And it looks quite pretty, as Mexican border towns go. Even for its age, Rainbow Six Vegas has some pretty good graphics. The intention is to use the walls as cover and poke your head around corners to see what lies ahead. But this doesn't work well for me. It's actually quite jarring when you pull away from your cover, enough to be annoying enough for me to do it as little as possible.
Lads! Has anyone got any tokens? I just need to hold two and I'll win ten grand!
Shooting from cover is also more or less impossible. You can do it, but of course you're not accurate and so you might as well not bother. I'll credit the game for building some real tension as you're trapped by terrorist gunfire, sitting there trying to work out your next action. Unfortunately, I'm too feeble to execute whatever that action might be, and I found myself hearing the main character's death sigh again and again.
I did at least manage to get to a checkpoint, which is something. It took me about 40 minutes and multiple tries, but at least it meant I wasn't stuck playing the very beginning of the game the whole time. No, I actually managed to play the second part of the first level over and over again, making pretty much no progress from game to game. I never did get to see Vegas... just as well I've been there before.
Ocean's 11, this ain't.
I don't like too many FPS games, and I don't like tactical squad-based games, either. But in the spirit of the blog and discovering new games, I thought I'd give this one a fair shot. Sadly, it hasn't worked out. It might not have helped that the copy I bought from eBay came without instructions, but I honestly don't think it would have made any difference if it came with instructions, cheat codes and Tom Clancy himself to sit and hold my hand while I played. I'm just not very good at games like this, and while I perservered with Call of Duty 4 and enjoyed that a lot, Rainbow Six Vegas just left me utterly frustrated. I'm sure it's fantastic if you like this kind of game, and apparently the multiplayer is excellent but I didn't play that. And I won't be either... I'm donating Rainbow Six Vegas to somebody else's gaming pile.
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