Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas review

Sequences like that happen all the time in Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas. You'll approach a new environment or new enemy from your old-fashioned, one-man-army FPS perspective and the more realistic, team-based Vegas will knock you right out. Learn to play by its rules, however, and it will reward you with an entirely different, but no less satisfying, way to play a shooter game.

So while you may be used to charging through levels, strafing from side to side and fragging every pixel that blinks at you wrong, doing so in Rainbow Six Vegas will just get you killed repeatedly and frustratingly. Instead, the game retrains your brain to look for cover first and shoot later. Seeking protective objects in the environment to hide behind, duck beneath, press up against or dart between is absolutely crucial to any kind of success. Walls, pillars, chairs, slot machines... practically anything solid and nearby is fair game.

You'll need everything you can find, too, as just a few hits in Rainbow Six Vegas will take you down. And the terrorists? They're both as vulnerable and as adept at taking cover as you are. The results are long, exhausting back-and-forth battles filled with breath-holding silences, nerve-wracking peeks around corners and intermittent, staccato bursts of gunfire. They may not be as fast, but the showdowns here are undeniably more intense and dramatic than in the vast majority of other action games.