You should know as you read that I am an avid fan of the first two Rainbow Six titles for Xbox and would be lying if I said I wasn’t hoping for what would amount to an expansion pack with new maps, more weapons and a few new modes. In Rainbow Six Lockdown I got all of those things, however, I also got a game that didn’t quite look like Rainbow Six, but more so didn’t really feel like Rainbow Six, either. And this has left me scratching my head.

It’s really hard not to be critical of a title when its predecessors have been so engaging. I found Lockdown to be relatively well made, however, it has taken a slightly different path to reach a similar goal.



If you are intimately familiar with the Rainbow Six lineage, Lockdown will feel different to you as soon as you jump into a campaign. There is a very arcade-like vibe, yet still you find yourself in the midst of a squad-based shooter. As you play you will probably feel like you are watching the action unfold instead of an actual participant in the fray. It seems that much of this is due to the altered, not improved, AI and a glossy look to the whole game. Gone are the subtly lit environments and highly detailed textures. In their place are much less dramatic, but very shiny new rooms and streets. At times, shiny to the point of impaired sight due to the glaring effect of odd lighting, especially outside. Without question, the visual appearance does a lot to develop the feel of any game, and unsurprisingly, this one looks less real and feels less real.

There are other elements that contribute to the arcade experience, and tracer fire, lots and lots of tracer fire, is one of them. All of these tracers amount to an orange line giving away the location of all enemies that may be too far away to be immediately identified. While helpful, they may as well have posted signs along your path with big red arrows and a Price Is Right girl pointing directly to the bad men in the next room.

The gameplay itself is basically the same; lead a group of elite commandos around the world bustin’ up the bad guys and come home with the hostages intact. Like I said, same as before, except now you are the commander of a team consisting of two ladies and two gentlemen. Even video games about swift death can be sensitive to the political arena. Your squad has also begun to make comments about the most ridiculous things. Maybe this is an attempt to make your team seem more real, but if so, it falls far short of that goal. In fact, I would argue it never got off the ground. It’s too bad you don’t have a “shut the hell up” command, as it would come in most useful..

The single player game has been stretched a little to include the addition of a sniper portion to some of the missions. In these segments you play the part of Dieter Weber, team sniper, and you must protect your people from afar as they work their way across an area. I love this idea, which extends the interaction, yet is well within the reality of the game. Great move Ubisoft!

While the controller functions almost identically as before, there are a couple little changes… one of which is making me insane! Vision. If you can’t see the damn game you can’t play it! Or at least you can’t play it very well. Or at least I can’t. All the vision modes are now controlled by the white button, which means you no longer turn it on or off, but rather cycle through until you have the one you want. This would not be so big a deal except that I found myself using the night vision frequently, since the lighting elements were typically darker. But now, thanks to the blinding glare coming from places like… sidewalks?… or the sides of brick buildings?.... I am constantly turning my goggles on and off, but in the process I am cycling through thermal vision and when someone starts shooting at me, the last thing I need to do is worry about whether I have the right pair of goggles on or not. Damn it!

A new and clever, yet unfortunately stupid effect is that your goggles (which you apparently wear all the time) will get wet, which in turn will blur your vision. Clever. However, when you get shot up pretty bad, bullet holes appear in your goggles and they go blurry, just like when you got that water on them. Stupid. So now you’re almost dead AND you can’t see shit. And it happens this way every freakin’ time. Aside from finding this to be most frustrating, I thought it odd that I could be shot three times in the face and still be commanding my troops. Another great example of how this game feels different from the previous two.

Perhaps the one element in Lockdown that really got me excited was the addition, FINALLY, of the heartbeat monitor. For those players who have actually read the Tom Clancy novel Rainbow Six, on which this entire series is based, you may remember the final engagement in the woods where this tool was the deciding factor for final elimination of the threat that plagued the team from the beginning. Like many others, I was ecstatic to hear the Rainbow Six games were coming to consoles (as the PC version didn’t fly on my laptop at the time) and subsequently fell in love with Ubisoft’s creation for the Xbox. But upon playing my copy for the first time I immediately asked, “where is the heartbeat monitor?” Thankfully, in installment #3 our little friend has come home.



Some players may feel this is a cheap addition, as it does give away the approximate location of enemies and their numbers, thus eliminating some of the surprise. My two cents? This was a real part of the original story, and you are supposed to be the commander of the most elite of all counter-terrorism units on the globe. Surprise is not something so often embraced and given the slant this franchise has taken (in the past), simulation vs. arcade, I would say this device is appropriate. After all, if you like surprises…. don’t turn it on. Besides, there are plenty of surprises buried within this title such as:

• My team apparently suffers from an occasional bout of temporary, yet instant blindness when firing at the enemy. For whatever reason, they fire as accurately at ten feet as they do across the state of Oklahoma.

• Although the enemy AI has improved (at times), my team’s AI seems to be progressing at the rate of… well maybe not. When I send them to a point I think will be advantageous to the task at hand, they will often choose alternate cover, sometimes resulting in the “incapacitation” of one or more. Although terribly endearing, I find it makes for slow going when my squad will occasionally “interpret” my orders and run off to their untimely demise.

• The new “zoom” feature has a blurry gun covering the bottom 1/3 of the screen and the actual scope remains relatively small and a ways off, making your scope on several guns all but useless. I found I had better luck if I just scanned the aiming reticle across the screen waiting for it to turn red and then unloading in that general direction.

Multiplayer in Rainbow Six Lockdown is where this game will earn its dime. Ubisoft has added several new features to make for a potentially exciting stay on Xbox Live. As before, Practice Mission and Terrorist Hunt are available for cooperative play. Adversarial play has seen the addition of Retrieval (Capture the Flag) and Total Conquest (King of the Hill) to the older modes Team Survival and Team Sharpshooter. Perhaps the most exciting addition is the Persistent Elite Creation mode. This is basically the creation of your own unique character for your online play. Much in the way and RPG works, you select a class of character (Commando, Spec-Op, Engineer, or Combat Medic) and then work to level them up, earning experience points for the number of matches you play, regardless of the outcome. Each new level offers something new for your character to use. Also, you can spend your earned credits at the Quartermaster’s Shop purchasing new equipment or repairing your old, which mind you, will become damaged in online play, thus providing you less protection if you don’t get it fixed.

Overall, it seems to me that Ubisoft has made an attempt to appeal to a different audience than those already within their grasp with the arcade look and play of this title. At least I hope that to be the case, because I can’t think of a single reason that manyt of these additions could be considered improvements if the intent was to enhance an already fantastic game. I would also venture to guess that they put more work into developing, and are banking on, the online content far more than the single-player mode. It seems that this game was designed for Xbox Live, with new and exciting features, but with a step to one side, or a slide backwards (depending on your perspective) in preservation of in-game experience.



Article By: Moe