I blogged about my routinely abysmal abilities in first-person shooters recently here. But one game I’ve been having loads of fun in is Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2 on the PS3.
One thing to get right out of the way though: the game hasn’t really got anything much to do with Tom Clancy, the famed author of bestseller thriller novels aside apart from that one of this books concerns the exploits of the similar elite counter-terrorist unit Rainbow Six featured in the game.
Now Rainbow Six Vegas 2 is a little different from your typical first-person shooter game types. Specifically, this one’s a tactical shooter. In other words, if you were to run n’ gun your way through like some of the admittedly as enjoyable shooter games, you’ll get perforated into Swiss cheese pretty quick. No, stealth is key here, and you always try to take down ‘tangos’, or the codeword for terrorists, silently, quietly, and without them noticing if at all possible. At the hardest and ‘realistic’ difficulty levels, all it takes is one bullet with your name on it for you to go under too.
The story too is worthy of a movie feature, though while actually in the game itself I was too busy sneaking around or dodging bullets to actually let any of the dialog register.
The array of equipment at your disposal in fact underlines the fact that you really shouldn’t be running into corridors and rooms with guns blazing. Like say for instance: the room on the floor below you is occupied with bad guys. So you and your team rappel down, do a 180 degree inversion, then take out the baddies with pistols in a breach-room action.
Or if you’re behind a door and you hear voices coming from behind it of bored terrorists yakking away to bide their time. Need to know how many of them are in the room? Use a snake cam to peer inside the room, then mark out to your team which one of those fools are priority targets to take out first upon breach. Then situate your team right outside the door, while you sneak to the other side door for you to come in from another side of the room. Then issue an entry order, and you and your team come in on different sides.
And my favorite: thermal imaging! The terrorists are holed up inside a room with their guns pointing at a couple of hapless hostages. Get your team to the door, note the relative positions of the bad guys and where the hostages are. Then engage thermal vision goggles, then send your team in with a breach order with smoke grenades. The bad guys can’t see you but you can see them just fine.
Ok the last tactic only really works well when there aren’t too many other heat-emitting sources in the room, but it’s just loads of fun to head shot the bad guy emitting yellow, then as he collapses into a heap watch the heat emission dissipate as he expires.
The locations are pretty varied too, and include Píc des Pyreneés, Las Vegas Convention Center and Las Vegas Hilton hotel.
And the best part: you have two minions in your team to command and order around LOL.
“Hustle!” (i.e. follow me)
“On your six.” (i.e. right behind you)
All very therapeutic.:)
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