Excessive

Rainbow Six: Lockdown is a realistic, squad based tactical first person shooter, released in September of 2005. Lockdown is the third Rainbow Six title to appear on the Xbox, and was greeted with fair reviews, netting a 74 average according to Metacritic. The game was developed by Ubisoft Montreal, creators of Splinter Cell and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, as well as Prince of Persia Sands of Time and many others.

In order to accurately review Rainbow Six: Lockdown, one would really have to compare it to the previous Rainbow Six's on the Xbox and see how it holds up. There are many differences, in gameplay and how they're approach on mechanics as well as the overall style of play. While the first two (when I say first two from now on, I'm referring to the first two R6's on Xbox) were very unique, very particular style games, they made Lockdown feel a little bit more generic.

What I mean by generic is simply... in the first two, aiming was very sensitive, and took a while to get used to, but once you got used to it, it felt very natural. In Lockdown, it controls much like Halo or any other FPS would, very smooth and fast. The new aiming was very welcome at first, because it was much easier to just have anyone jump in and instantly be able to headshot, but near the end I kinda of missed the uniqueness and the skills required to aim in the others.

They really did a nice job on improving the visuals, making the character models look nice and unique, the guns were very impressive to look at and hear... they sounded appropriately loud and powerful or quiet and stealthy. Levels had a lot of detail and there was good use of lighting.

One change for the worse was your team's AI. Oh man, was it annoying. They actually greatly improved the players ability to direct your team mates, with an obvious and easy to see marker where you wanted them to go, and they would take cover and peak out of the sides, but... well, for example sometimes they would take cover on the wrong side of the cover and simply die. Probably the most annoying thing is that if you have your team set to follow you, and they see an enemy, they stop following you, and you have to press the button again to get them to follow, so if you aren't paying that much attention, you could easily leave your team on the other side of the level. Why can't they just always follow you!? By far the worst part of the game.

Another aspect that took it farther away from what Rainbow Six is at it's core, is they added the ability to save it whenever you wanted, however many times you wanted. In the first two, you got three saves per level, and it was up to you when you used them. This added a level of strategy to figure out the best times to save and things like that, but when you add the ability to save as much as you want, it introduces this side effect of causing the player to save after every little action, and reloading if it goes wrong. Save, try something, load, try something save, repeat. And this method was necessary on the last two levels... they made them so random and difficult that you really had to save after every room in case you got shot and killed for one mistake.

My last complaint would be the split screen co-op. Playing through Rainbow Six: Black Arrow with a friend is an extremely fun and rewarding experience, and I was looking forward to playing through Lockdown in a similar manner, but it was difficult to enjoy because they took out the ability to save. While playing co-op (as in single player) the mission is split into 2 or 3 areas (for loading purposes) and so the only time the game 'saves' is when you load the next area. This means that if there is a really hard room right before the end, and you die, you go all the way back to the start. Over.. and over again.. and over again, until you throw the controller and punch a Grey cat. Seriously, it took a lot of the fun out of co-op because you have to play the level over and over again, for hours, and memorize exactly where every enemy is, and where they all come in, and then try to do it without getting hit so that by the time you get to the third area you don't die and have to start all over again.

Now that I've got the complaints out of the way, there was fun in the game, and I did enjoy playing the game, don't get me wrong. I didn't pay any attention to the story this time around, simply because I wasn't in the mood, and then after I missed a lot of the story it made no sense to start half way through, so I basically skipped the briefings every time. They did try to inject more story into the game and I applaud that, and they did it pretty well. It's very satisfying to headshot enemies, and to throw a perfect grenade, and the locations of the levels were varied and interesting. I just feel that they moved the game too closer to being a generic FPS, and too far away from a unique tactical shooter. I still enjoyed the game enough to give it a 7/10, but I wish it was more like the first two.

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