Reviewed: July 9, 2007
Reviewed by: Mark Smith

Publisher
Ubisoft

Developer
Ubisoft Quebec City

Released: June 12, 2007
Genre: Tactical Shooter
Players: 1-4

8
8
6
7
7.3

Supported Features:

The game still takes place in Vegas, obviously, but deals with concurrent events that were happening during the assault on Vegas on the console and PC. We now join Brian Armstrong and his British sniping partner, Shawn Rivers, and back in the chopper shouting orders (literally) is Joanna Torres.

Missions take you all over the Vegas area including a water treatment facility where terrorist plan to poison the water supply for Las Vegas, but it all turns out to be one huge diversion for a much more greater and deadlier plot. You’ll have to play it to learn what that is.

One extremely nasty feature I didn’t really realize until the very final chapter (when I had to restart from scratch) is that your health and ammo aren’t readily replenishable. There are no med kits or healing stations and no ammo drops. This means that the health and ammo you start with is all you get until the end of the chapter…sort of. I did learn that if you die and restart from the last checkpoint you will start with half a health bar. This means you only have to survive to the next checkpoint, but as for ammo…well, let’s just say you had better conserve some assault rifle ammo for the very end of this game.

Typically, FPS games don’t fare that well on the PSP. Without dual sticks it’s nearly impossible to move and aim at the same time, but Vegas uses the analog movement and face-button aiming system that has been used in previous FPS games, and surprisingly enough, this is probably the best implementation of that system to date.

To assist when any aiming inconsistencies the game also allows you to target lock with a quick squeeze of the left shoulder button and if you follow that up with a press on the Triangle your lock snaps to the target’s head for a nice quick headshot. Once you get into the left-trigger-triangle rhythm you’ll be capping terrorists heads with ease. And therein lies one of the very few complaints I had about this game – it is just too easy.

The rest of the commands are ingenious, not only in the way they managed to get so much into the limited controls on the PSP but just how much it makes sense. Your right trigger fires and everything else from crouching, opening doors, hacking computers, switching weapons, and activating visions modes is all handled with the D-pad, either through tapping or holding on a direction. Even reloading is easy with a quick double-tap of the left trigger.

The only thing that really needed a button of its own was the snap-to-cover command. The consoles allowed you to squeeze a trigger to hug a wall, but on the PSP you have to move directly into or away from a wall or object to take cover or leave cover. For the most part it works, at least until you find yourself under fire and are rushing to take cover and don’t have time to line up perfectly for the snap to work.

Either before or after taking cover you can stand or crouch allowing you to duck below windows or peak above short objects. You can lean out and get your crosshairs on the enemy before squeezing the trigger to complete the movement where you lean out and open fire. This is the only time you are really vulnerable, but if you snap to their head they go down too quick to return fire.

Vegas mixes up the mission styles by switching between Brian and Shawn, and while Brian’s mission are usually more fun – and there are more of them, Shawn only gets a few meager missions where he provides cover fire for Brian using his scoped sniper rifle or he might have to access a computer or switch to open a door or activate an elevator. There is an element of teamwork involved even though you never really play as both characters during the same missions.

As previously stated, Shawn doesn’t have that many missions, which is a relief since when he’s not in a position to snipe his enemies he is pretty worthless as a character. Your sidearm is relatively weak except at close range and with headshots, so if you get caught in a position where you have to fight with your sniper rifle, you’ll find you cannot target lock and you cannot use the scope when behind cover. Time to break out the frag grenades.

Rainbow Six has always been about the multiplayer and Vegas on the PSP offers full support of Ad-Hoc and Internet play, even if it is far more limited that the PC and console versions. You can engage in versus and team modes of up to four players. These modes work despite the removal of the left-trigger auto-lock feature – I suppose to make things fairer all around. I would have really enjoyed a co-op story mode where Shawn and Brian could have actually gone through these levels together.

There are a few hiccups with clipping that allows gun barrels to point through doors (“Ed…is that you?”) and one instance where I could use my scope to see through walls if I got close enough so that the game perceived the far end of my scope was actually on the other side of the wall.

Character models and animation are smooth and lifelike and all the menus and HUD are nicely designed. There are a couple of very nice cinematics and a gorgeous splash screen that you might want to make your PSP wallpaper, although since there is only one splash screen you’ll likely be sick of it by the end of the game.

And somebody needs to tell Joanna that just because she is riding in a noisy chopper doesn’t mean she has to yell every last word in her reports and updates. That mic is only 1-2” from your lips, girl…take it down a notch or two. I cringed and scrambled to loosen my ear buds every time her shrieking voice would come over my com-link.

Given the delay of both the PSP and the PS3 version of Vegas I was really hoping to see some USB or Wi-Fi inter-connectivity or data exchange between the two systems, sort of like the last SOCOM did. We can only dream…