Viva La Vegas
It's nearly a year late, but Rainbow Six Vegas has arrived and hooboy is it good stuff.
Published: July 19, 2007
All of it is great stuff, supports headsets with zero lag (that includes the servers too), and is just a generally zippy service. There is a problem, though: the game has no actual lobby for searching for games. You pick your game type, some basic rules and then the service finds a match for you. This often leads to rooms where you're kicked instantly because the people playing are either complete tools or a bunch of friends just want to stick together and play games with each other. Either way, you get booted back to the main online menu, which means more loading screens and you have to try it all again.
Fortunately, the archaic way of finding a game is offset at least a little by the Persistent Elite Creation aspect. You're able to create a basic male or female op, set the face and some light decals and then as you play games, you gain experience which goes toward you total rank. When you gain enough ranks (it's not a 1:1 progress thing, but you can check it any time from the main online menu), you unlock more goodies. It's similar to what Resistance: Fall of Man did at launch, and like Resistance, Rainbow Six Vegas offers medals/rewards for doing stuff during matches too, so there's plenty there to unlock as well.
One of the main reasons for the game being delayed so much has been the notoriously bad performance of the Unreal Engine on the PS3's crazy multi-core setup. The combination of CELL SPUs and RSX handling the graphical details, not to mention the 256/256MB RAM split instead of the half gig of unified RAM that the Xbox 360 has, plus the initial version of the Unreal Engine being optimized for the 360 setup means straight ports are almost out of the question. Sony announced last week that they were working with Epic to bring the Unreal Engine 3 in line with other versions for the PS3, but there's been plenty of talk that Unreal Engine games run like crap on the PlayStation 3.
Well you wouldn't know it by looking at Vegas. Though the game only goes up to 1080i, it performs admirably, though it's not rock solid the entire time. Texture detail is nice too, though I've no doubt someone will make a straight comparison and declare it the end of the world for the PS3, the bottom line is the game looks next-gen, and considering what could have been the sorry state of the port, it's nice to know little things like the detail in the R6 uniforms and load outs still pops even after all this time. The view when the chopper pulls out of Mexico during end of the first stage to head to Vegas and skirts along port, the water down below all beautifully shaded while buildings stretch out almost to the horizon, it all makes for an impressive showcase for the PS3's power.
Things are a little bumpier on the audio side. No, the game's no slouch when it comes to music or even sound effects -- both are clean and the latter is pumped out into the back channels nicely, but the balance is a little too low. Major radio chatter and the stuff picked up over the air and sent to the HUD is nice and loud, but there are times when it's almost impossible to hear the actual radio chatter. I really wish more devs had taken Zipper Interactive's cue and included the option to pipe radio chatter into a headset. With a game like this, it would have been absolutely perfect, and alas, some of the conversation gets lost.
The one area where the game really falters, however, is in the voice work. Yes, it's nice to have Spanish being barked around, and having supposed ex-spec ops soldiers basically telegraphing their actions, is, if nothing else, amusing, but it's the actual voices themselves that bugged me. Was my Brit squadmate actually British or was he an Aussie? He never seemed to know for sure, and would regularly bounce back and forth (something that the PSP version had too). In all, it pulled me out of the experience just a bit, though a huge firefight pulled me back in pretty quickly.
Even with a little nitpicking, it's hard not to consider Rainbow Six Vegas a huge success. As someone who played the original Red Storm games back when they were self-publishing, and spent way too much time with some LAN games with friends, both the single and multiplayer portions of Vegas trounce anything Ubisoft's dev teams have done thus far. They really have stepped it up, and I can only hope the PS3 version of the game will have the kind of longevity that the 360 version has experienced. It certainly deserves it.
