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| Get your men ready... | And preferably all going the same way... |
After its imprisonment in console land, Rainbow Six returns to the PC with a bad attitude, some interesting tattoos and a little less intelligence than it left with. Team Rainbow behave at times like delinquent children,
refusing orders and following you around even when you know you told them to stay several times. They also apparently didn't listen during training either, which makes using flash grenades an interesting experience, as your team is blinds itself with the alacrity of a two year old drinking dish washing liquid.
However, like a petulant child, Lockdown still brings with it some of the good parts of its progenitors. It is definitely recognizable as part of the Rainbow Six series, though it fails to bring the same realistic edge, due to a slight arcadey feel about the whole thing.
Rainbow Six: Lockdown finds you and your team jetting all about the world fighting terrorists, don't expect much of a story line, because apparently thats not really what this is about. Yours is not to question why, yours is to etc, etc,etc. It turns out, in true terrorist fashion, that the little scumbags are planning on releasing a nanotech virus at the NATO summit meeting in Spain. Just like them really, and a good enough reason for any red blooded protector of the innocent to go and mow them down indiscriminately.
So, off you go, traipsing across the world and killing terrorists. You have a pretty decent array of guns and gadgetry to choose from, pistols, combat shotguns, assault rifles and submachine guns, which all look fairly
realistic. They can also all be equipped with an accessory to make the job easier. Things like scopes and silencers and red-dot sights are available, to name a few. You will also need to outfit your team with grenades and entry tools. Planning the mission is a bit hit and miss because the mission planning feature has gone, which means if you don't get it right the first time, you may very well have to quit and go and equip properly. Just as well this isn't real life or we'd all be dying of a nano virus by now.
The game attempts to make up for this by instead instituting a room entry planning facility that you can use in-game. This goes some way to solving the lack of planning, but unfortunately detracts once again from the
realism. I mean, I highly doubt that right now, someone in the Pentagon is saying "Alright men, we have to eradicate these terrorists who are holding XXX University hostage, everyone get a gun and follow me, we'll figure out how when we get there."
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| Careful now... | There are terrorists everywhere! |
The mission structure has also been shot to hell in the game, with some bright spark's idea to reorder the missions for PC. This means that sometimes your missions don't entirely make sense. The gameplay is pretty
similar no matter what the mission, however, so I guess they figured it didn't matter. Pretty much the idea is just to shoot terrorists and avoid getting killed yourself.
The other part of the game that features prominently is opening locked doors. Remember the entry tools I mentioned earlier? Well your team gets to have lots of fun with those, occasionally killing themselves, or merely maiming a few of their closest friends. Just like real life huh. One wonders how these loons got past basic training.
Then you'll encounter the terrorists, who apparently attended the ACME school of terrorism, and aren't a hell of a lot better. At times they seem unable to understand that anyone would want to kill them for their dastardly deeds, and so spend time contemplating walls in zen like fashion, rather than defending themselves against those who are shooting them in the head. Now terrorists might not on average be very smart at all, but come on, these guys would have never made it out of childhood without sticking a fork in a
toaster. Occasionally they will attempt to kill you, which is nice, but in many cases their prescence seems merely to show off the pretty ragdoll physics Ubisoft are so proud of.
The levels and environments have had a fair amount of work put into them, and it shows in the detail and the size. There are some pretty cool lighting effects to be enjoyed, and weather changes impact on your experience as well. There is also some pretty impressive realism in some areas, though others leave something to be desired. The character design was done very well also, on your side. The terrorists look somewhat like generic targets, which is basically what they are. The sounds are okay, with a decent variety of gunfire to enjoy, but less of the set phrases from the terrorists would have been nice. We know they're mindless drones, but do they really need to parrot one another ad nauseum?
The on line side of things is handled by Ubi.com, and provides a pretty solid experience. The servers do seem a tad slow, but all the functions you'd expect are there. There are multi player modes and single player, with a range of modes to choose from, like Retrieval, Rivalry and Team Adversarial. There is also the chance to play through the 16 missions cooperatively with other players, which is somewhat fun and beats your idiot team hands down most of the time.
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| Kill! Kill! | Hope that wasn't ours... |
RAINBOW SIX LOCKDOWN VERDICT
All in all, we welcome Rainbow Six back to the PC, and hopefully with some TLC, the next release will show improved attitude and functionality. In the meantime, we’ll be sending this version back to its room to think about what is done.
TOP GAME MOMENT
Laughing as my team blinded itself and then got cut down in a hail of bullets. Stupid people.
