Rainbow Six: Vegas is a member of the long running Tom Clancy series of video games where you play a supreme badass working more or less for the US government and tasked with destroying "bad guys" with a mix of standard and futuristic equipment. In this instance, you're a member of Rainbow Six, an anti-terrorist squad, tasked with taking out a group of terrorists that start in Mexico but soon make it to the titular Vegas. Stealth is paramount, but a quick trigger finger doesn't hurt. The experience is very polished, the controls are smooth, and the level design is brilliant. Multiplayer is dumb, the enemy AI is unbalanced, and the audio could use a lot of work. Since I play games almost exclusively for the multiplayer, it gets a WIN. If you don't care, bump it up to AWESOME.

So, first the good stuff: You play a special OPs heavily armored super soldier with all the trappings you've come to expect from a tactical action game. You always have a pistol, rifle, sub machine gun (or shotgun, but really, do you think this is DOOM or something?), two types of grenades, fiber optic camera, night vision, and thermal vision. You can rappel down buildings (even upside-down), crash through windows, peek under and blow open doors, and snipe someone from a mile away. It's really awesome. Plus, your in-game radar draws the locations of any enemies that are visible or audible, meaning you have to attempt to sneak a peak at the enemies or try to hear where they are to get a tactical advantage.

You are the leader of a 4 man team. As many of you know from other games of this type, that means you're part kindergarten teacher and part Nazi Gestapo. If you're not trying to herd your crack special ops team through a doorway they can't seem to figure out, you're sending them out to their deaths because you're low on ammo. When it works, it works great. You give the order for your team to take cover behind the old Chevy and kill the terrorists on the left, then you run around the other way and surprise the terrorists on the right. Brilliant! Or, you could tell your team to hide behind the old Chevy, and they instead hide on the terrorist's side of the Chevy and say "I'm Hit!" four times before dying. It's really a crap shoot as to what you'll get. Mostly, it works fine. But relying on the AI to work correctly is a bad move. Use them only when you're out of ammo, or when you need a distraction.

There's also a great cover system in the game. Cover systems are pretty standard at this point in the industry, but the Vegas system is particularly cool because it give you complete control over how you pop in and out of cover. You hold LT to hide behind a low wall, for instance. Then you can press left or right to slide back and forth along the wall. When you reach the end, continuing to press to one side will have your character spring out to fire around the wall. Press MORE, and you'll actually be able to wrap around the wall to see if anyone is crouching on the other side. It's a great mechanic that makes clearing out doorframes much easier. Of course, at the aforementioned wall you could have just pushed UP on the stick to pop out over the wall like in any other game.

The weapon selection is pretty standard. You get a lot of choices for assault rifles and whatnot, but they're all given stats, and you always pick the best one. The single-player campaign allows you to progress through the weapons higher and higher, which I never thought made any sense. What world do these developers live in where the US Army gives special forces anti-terrorist squads sub-par equipment and says "if you survive this mission, we'll give you a silencer!" Dumb. However, I understand the need to upgrade your character in some way, I just wish it had been done better.

The environments, like I've said before, are brilliantly designed, but I'd like to clarify. Each individual room or collection of rooms is brilliant, but the connections between them are dumb. The game is VERY linear. There's no exploration, no way to simply fight your way AROUND the main force, none of that. You may be in an office building full of terrorists, but apparently this office building was never inspected by the fire marshal, because there's only one door and one flight of stairs. However, once you get past the fact that "tactical" only applies to the individual combat maneuvers, you're going to have fun.

Now, as for the bad parts: Audio is first. Most of your objectives are vague like "make it to extraction point" or "locate the entrance to the terrorist base." The keys to the mission (like "make it to the extraction point ON TOP OF THE OLD SPANISH MISSION") are given to you by your inexplicably nerdy op commander, who is always sitting in a helicopter that is always under fire, as are you. So the audio message you get sounds more like "Ok BANG BANG extractio- CHOP CHOP CHOP Span- BANG -ion BOOM". There's no subtitles, and no repeats.

The enemy AI is...strange as well. Like I said before, the maps are linear for the most part. However, the game seems obsessed with "find alternate paths." Apparently they read an old review of Deus Ex and decided that was the way to go. "Alternate Paths" in this case consist of you standing at the end of a long hallway facing 3 terrorists hiding behind a desk at the other end. To your left is a clearly marked air conditioning duct large enough to fit a commando in full armor. It comes out just to the left of the desk the terrorists are hiding behind. Go into the duct, walk (don't crawl) around the desk, and shoot the terrorists in the SIDE of the head, instead of the face. It's a little dumb. Plus, the terrorists fall for this only half the time. Sometimes they're standing there dumbly waiting for you to walk out into their line of sight, and sometimes they're standing next to the duct with a shotgun pointed at your face, waiting for you. There's no way to tell if you're going to win easily or have no chance, so you may as well have the fun of trying to pick them off from behind cover and ignoring the "alternate paths."

The enemies seem to come in waves. Sometimes you'll be able to slowly make your way through a room, picking off people one by one from behind cover. Other times you'll walk through a door and two dozen terrorists will come crashing through the windows and doors from all angles, rushing your position and leaving you with very little hope of survival. The game has an "innovative" health system. I put that in quotes because it's old at this point, but was new at the time. Similar to Gears of War, you die if you get hit for more than X points of damage in any given 20 second period. If you get shot in the chest with a shotgun and survive, you only have to sit tight for 20 seconds or so until you heal. It gives each individual injury less weight, but also allows you to be killed with one shot, so it's the worst of both worlds!

Now for the last complaint: Multiplayer. I got this game specifically because "co-op campaign missions" was on the box. However, you ONLY get the map, not the actual missions. When I said before that you have to get to the extraction point on top of the old Spanish mission? In co-op mode, you're dropped in the street. That's it. No mission, no objective points, no audio AT ALL. And certainly no friendly AI. You and a friend have to figure out the missions (or argue about your memory of the mission from single-player mode) then try to make your way through the map to where you think the mission objective is. Luckily the maps are very linear, so going from start to finish should be an easy task. There's also sometimes a small arrow on your screen showing you the direction of the objective, whatever it may be. Once you arrive, the screen goes dark, "Mission has ended" appears, and you're taken to the menu where you can select another map. It's unpolished, unfinished, and dumb. Co-op terrorist hunt is fun, but unfortunately it's timed. You have 10 minutes to kill 30 terrorists in a map that stretches probably 2.5 miles. This means you have to throw tactics and stealth out the window and just hope there's not a shotgun behind the next door. It changes the game, and not in a good way.

So anyway, after all that, the verdict is:
GOOD: Single player is good, great even. Cover is great, controls are clean, camera is perfect (since it's first person).
BAD: Friendly AI is sometimes unreliable, maps are linear, enemy AI has two settings: sit there waiting to die, and unstoppable wall of bullets, hard to hear audio with no subtitles.
UGLY: co-op multiplayer is tacked on, no checkpoints in co-op coupled with instant-fail end-of-mission situations makes you mad.

Last Word: If you like this sort of game and will be playing alone, go for it. It's a great single player tactical experience. If you're going for co-op missions, pass.