Rainbow Six Vegas Review

PSP copy of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas inserted: check. Power on: check.

Instantly you're treated to a graphically stunning intro scene. A roulette wheel spins and, in the reflection of the wheel's metal rims, the Rainbow Six team burst into a Casino, eyes down the barrel of their MP5's and flashbang grenades blinding the enemy. It's quite possibly the best PSP intro scene I've ever experienced. You're served a similar graphical feast with the cut scene at the beginning of the first level, but this is literally as good as the game gets - before the gameplay has actually begun.

There isn't really an FPS that the PSP can call its own. It's probably fair to say that the genre hasn't faired well on Sony's pocket sized box of magic. As Rainbow Six is a tactical shooter that places you in the position of a special ops soldier - requiring the player to use stealth and accuracy to negotiate levels - it relies even more heavily on the basic gameplay cornerstones of an FPS such as AI and responsive gunplay. It fails miserably on even these basic tasks.

The AI is atrocious. At a distance, enemies won't notice you when you're clearly in their line of sight. More troublingly, at times you can stand face-to-face with would be attackers for at least a couple of seconds before they actually do anything. To be fair, if you replay an area then you'll see that AI adversaries do react differently each time. Also, they will attempt to find cover and fire from it. But these are basic requirements of a modern FPS.

Having developed RSV in-house, Ubisoft have rounded off their basic gameplay failings by developing a game with very sluggish controls. The controls utilise the action buttons for looking around, the thumbstick for moving, attacks are commanded using the shoulder buttons and the D-pad is responsible for a variety of other commands. The sluggishness of the controls is down to the unresponsive action buttons used for 'look' commands. This compromises on accuracy and speed during combat which is irritating to say the least.

Another basic flaw is the game's tendency to occasionally freeze during fighting sequences. The freeze only lasts a second or two, but it always seems to be at a crucial point such as when you're strafing across a room of bad guys and opening fire simultaneously. I've spoilt moments less effectively by telling my girlfriend, post-fornication, that I spotted some cellulite around her thighs - who am I kidding?! I don't have a girlfriend, but you get the idea.

Because the Rainbow Six series tries to stress realism as much as possible, it seems a little strange when your health magically replenishes between checkpoints (rather than the cool blurred screen affect on the next-gen titles). Additionally, the graphics in-game are the definition of mediocre for the PSP. Environments are jagged, there's considerable ghosting and when enemies move they look like somebody strafing in multiplayer N64 Goldeneye (i.e. a bit like Michael Jackson doing the moonwalk).

What can I say that's good about this game? Well, it's a functioning FPS I suppose. The snake-cam, which allows you to look under doors etc. and see what awaits you in the next room, is a really neat little gadget. Also, the music is straight out of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie (think The Rock), and that means there's an immersive soundtrack. Although you only hear this during cut-scenes and the hideous voice-overs in-game cancel out these positives sound wise. The feature of moving into a third person view when you find cover and the aiming mechanism to shoot from it is decent enough, although the system in the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of RSV are many leagues above it.

That is a theme throughout the PSP version - it consistently manages to fall far short of the lofty marks left by its bigger brothers on the Xbox 360 and PS3. One of the great features from these was the ability to command a squad. The integration of this feature was seamless and it really made you believe you were an elite special-ops soldier. This doesn't even feature on the PSP in the single-player game. As in the next-gen title you have Joanna Torres as your intelligence officer. Other than that the only characters involved are Brian Armstrong (the all-American loose cannon) and Shawn Rivers (the experienced, expert sniper Brit), and you play as both at different points. These characters only tend to cross paths and there is very little interaction between them at all.