If you have a Japanese Xbox Live account, you can download a Rainbow Six: Vegas demo. If you don’t have a Japanese account, you’ll have to wait for the next issue of Official Xbox Magazine to get your hands on it. To create a Japanese account, follow the instructions found right here.
The first thing you notice when you load the demo and start playing is how great everything looks. Similar to GRAW, you start out by doing a flyover of Vegas in a helicopter while listening to your mission briefing, and it is really something spectacular. When you land and actually begin your mission, you are greeted with great looking lighting and textures, and a level of detail that is right up there among the best you’ll find in a console game.
The gameplay is also very well done. The controls are surprisingly intuitive, and you’ll figure out how to switch vision modes, toss grenades, and order your squadmades around very quickly. New to R6 Vegas is that you can press up against cover and fire around corners and over obstacles. This is just one of the many touches that make Rainbow Six: Vegas stand out above and beyond the other entries in the series. The best part is that the whole game has been tweaked so that it is a lot more inviting to new players. It is far from a run-and-gun game, and strategy plays a major role, but it isn’t going to frustrate you like some Tom Clancy’s game would in the past.
Overall, Rainbow Six: Vegas is shaping up to be a great shooter. It is scheduled for release on November 14th, and is absolutely going to be worth picking up. In addition to the full single-player campaign, you will also get a robust multiplayer mode via Xbox Live. The only real problem I can foresee is that there are a ton of great games coming out in November and something is inevitably going to get lost in the shuffle. Somehow, I doubt that will happen to R6: Vegas.
