This preview was originally published on Gaming Horizon, GameBump's predecessor. Its format does not match our own but we support its content.

You know what they say, “What happens in Vegas... is a really annoying ad campaign that I wish people would stop quoting.”

The latest addition in the Rainbow Six series for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 takes the action to Sin City itself, Las Vegas. The elite team of counter-terrorist, counter-hostage, counter-everything officers are tasked with infiltrating gigantic casinos and other Vegas hotspots to stop hostage-takers, terrorists, and all other forms of badness.

The title shares a lot of elements with Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, this game’s older second-cousin. Like in GRAW, the events all play out in a linear storyline spanning only a few hours; and when a mission is over, the player is taken straight to the next mission via helicopter and is briefed in-flight. There’s no mission briefing screen; there’s no time to study a map and spend  a lot of time scrutinizing over minute details, which was something that was one of the defining elements of earlier Rainbow Six games. For that, Rainbow Six: Vegas is a lot less deliberate and a lot more kinetic, as decisions are made on-the-fly and there will always be a new threat. 

Unlike GRAW, however, and more like Rainbow Six, is the wide array of options for performing different tasks. The E3 demo we were shown this year started off with the player’s team dropping out of a helicopter onto the roof of a casino and having to decide how to get into the building.  There are stairs from the roof, yes, but stairs are a tactical nightmare from an encroachment standpoint (one guy at the bottom of the stairs with a keen eye and a quick trigger finger and you’re hosed). The other option is to repel down the side of the building. 

Repelling in R6: Vegas is more refined than we’ve seen in other games featuring the same ability (oddly enough, almost all of them are Tom Clancy games). You can repel downward at any speed you wish; you can stop to look into windows and even shoot at enemies through windows while repelling, and now you can also flip upside-down and descend head-first, allowing you to control your weapon better and to shield most of your body from the window. 

You can also be sneaky with repelling; it isn’t all about shooting baddies through glass. You can snake the fiber-optic camera through windows and cracks to get a better look around, and while doing so you can target enemies and specify which of your teammates should attack whom for a terrifically orchestrated breach. This “enemy tagging” technique can be used at any time using the snake cam, including under doors, around corners, and so on.

Other new(ish) gameplay features are wall-hugging, a staple these days for intrusion; the ability to blind-fire out of corners or over cover (sticking the gun up and shooting without the character being able to see what he’s aiming at); and some great team-based breaching maneuvers for getting through doors, across rooms, and other mundane activities that become much more complicated when around any corner could be a mean guy with a gun. 

The game itself is really quite beautiful looking. Ubisoft is pretty famous for spectacular lighting and graphical effects, and what we’ve seen so far doesn’t disappoint. Because Rainbow Six: Vegas is being developed for the PlayStation 3 and looks to be one of the launch titles for that system, looking amazing isn’t really an option here  - but it’s still hard to tell what a final product on the PS3 will look like, as nearly everything we’ve seen has been running on development kits. Even on the Xbox 360, which we had a chance to look at (but not play) on during E3, the game looks flat out jaw-dropping. You heard me, I said “flat out.” 

The only real stitch here is the fact that there were no hands-on demos available at E3 in May - the only way to see the game was to watch a Ubisoft staffer play through and narrate what he was doing. Usually when they only allow developers to play the game on the show floor it means that the game will probably crash if you do anything but the “right” thing, but the game was still six months away from its launch date at the time. As long as everyone keeps doing his job, there shouldn’t be anything to worry about. 

Fans of the Rainbow Six roots might not like the abandonment of the whole “mission briefing” approach that defined the series on the PC, but sales charts seem to indicate that gamers prefer a more fast-paced, GRAW-style design. As the lines between all the different Tom Clancy series are so blurry anyway, you might as well just consider this a sequel to Advanced Warfighter that takes place in Vegas and not in the future. If that concept excites you, you can put all your money on Rainbox Six: Vegas this November and let it ride. Sorry, I had to make one corny Vegas pun.