Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Lockdown - OO hands on impressions

Roscoe · Post by **Roscoe** » Tue Feb 14, 2006 1:24 pm

I'm putting this in titles because Lockdown is shipping today and Yahoo Games has published a review of the game (2 out of 5 stars

):

Your reaction will probably include varying degrees of joy, disappointment, and maybe astonishment, because this is not any Rainbow Six you remember.

Pros: It's finally back on the PC
Cons: Bad AI and level design; Uninteresting multiplayer support, weapons, and tactical options

R.I.P. Rainbow Six series....

Jag · Post by **Jag** » Tue Feb 14, 2006 2:35 pm

I think the article is more entertaining than the game:

In many of the levels, you'll find Ubisoft ads in odd places. I suppose it's borderline believable that an abandoned Paris metro station is festooned with Prince of Persia ads, but it's downright silly that a secret terrorist training camp under the Paris catacombs has been supplied with a few Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter and Splinter Cell posters. Who knew the terrorists were so into Tom Clancy licensed products?

Clanwolfer · Post by **Clanwolfer** » Tue Feb 14, 2006 2:40 pm

Ubisoft could make a good golf game.

manhack · Post by **manhack** » Tue Feb 14, 2006 3:12 pm

after playing the console version of Lockdown and the PC demo that came out last week I alread knew it would suck. However, I had high hopes that they would fix as much as they could for the PC.

Besides, the PC versions of Rainbow 6 has amazing multiplayer. I never really finished the campaigns in Raven Shield, I loved the multiplayer too much to waste time on it. It seems that based on the review the multiplayer could be OK, but the demo map wasn't very good and the netcode seemed spotty at best. Too bad. It had good graphics and the potential was there.

skystride · Post by **skystride** » Tue Feb 14, 2006 3:19 pm

I thought Tom Clancy games stood out because they at least attempted to give a sense of realism. This move away is very disappointing although I will reserve judgement until I've tried the demo or read a few more reviews.

Turtle · Post by **Turtle** » Tue Feb 14, 2006 3:29 pm

Good god, what happened to Ubisoft? Someone fire those idiot marketing people.

Ever since splinter cell they've let their ads get way out of hand. Splinter Cell Chaos Theory was the last game of theirs to do in game ads well, now they're just plastering the crap all over the place.

Windows95 · Post by **Windows95** » Tue Feb 14, 2006 4:04 pm

I can overlook the ads if there's a good game in there, but if the game itself sucks...

And yes the ads are annoying. Swat 4 is bad for this. The last patch did little for the game but added a util that downloads new ads online and places them in the game. If they want to use my internet access to download ads, I better see a serious price drop in the game. I'm not paying full price for a game that then forces unwanted ads on me.

Creepy_Smell · Post by **Creepy_Smell** » Tue Feb 14, 2006 4:17 pm

If the game fails will market droids decide:

A) There is no market for RS type of games

or

B) Bad AI + level design + moving away from what series means made the game fail

EDIT: The review is strangely missing now from yahoo.

Punisher · Post by **Punisher** » Tue Feb 14, 2006 5:14 pm

Creepy_Smell wrote:If the game fails will market droids decide:

A) There is no market for RS type of games

or

B) Bad AI + level design + moving away from what series means made the game fail

Obviously A because the marketing droids are always correct and know what we want. This also means that there must be something wrong with you if you do't like the game....

hepcat · Post by **hepcat** » Wed Feb 15, 2006 2:09 pm

God, i hope this doesn't signal a general decline in the quality of the franchise itself! i just plopped down my preorder deposit on the 360 version of ghost recon: AW yesterday.

Turin Turambar · Post by **Turin Turambar** » Wed Feb 15, 2006 3:49 pm

hepcat wrote:God, i hope this doesn't signal a general decline in the quality of the franchise itself! i just plopped down my preorder deposit on the 360 version of ghost recon: AW yesterday.

Well, if you want to shoot at red rhombuses don't worry!

Roscoe · Post by **Roscoe** » Wed Feb 15, 2006 4:10 pm

Well, I already had a pre-order in for this, so I decided to sacrifice the rest of the money so that I might relate my experiences to the OO forum....

Installing now... 5 CDs... asks for 5700MB of disk space. Read the manual while disk swapping.

More to come...

UPDATE: Ok, I ran the first mission which is the same as the demo (I didn't play it more than through the first part in the parking garage).

First of all, yes, it does employ Starforce. Yes, I know that causes some people havoc. Me, I have an internal hard drive, three internal optical drives including a CD burner, an external DVD burner, three external drives, Alchohol 120% and Nero virtual disks and Starforce didn't bother them at all. Maybe I just have good karma

Installs on 5.53 GBs of hard drive space. Ran it at 1024x768, 4x AA, 8x Anisotropic settings. Game looks very pretty on a 2.8 GHZ, 1GB RAM, Radeon 800X Pro with Catalyst 6.1 drivers.

Yes, it's not Rainbow Six like before. No mission planning, no selecting team mates (they are assigned to you). And I'm not unhappy with that. I never did get too involved with all the route planning stuff and I always just grabbed whichever AI teammate I hadn't already gotten killed or wounded.

In the standard mission I played there were lots of tangos and yes, they got killed rather quickly. But this is the first mission and I suspect they are supposed to not be too bright. There is a "Challenge" setting for the campaign missions, I'll have to try that.

OK, also the maps are very different, pretty linear. The first mission involved three maps, only one of which I would say was large.

Looking at Lockdown not as a Rainbow Six family member but just as a FPS, I'd have to say it's not bad at all. Your team mates are fairly bright and could clear a room by themselves without gunning each other down. The action command system takes a little time to figure out, but soon I was sending my lads into harms way while I hid back waiting for the tangos to pop out and take a shot. Not too shabby.

And as I said, it's damn pretty. Yes, the Ubisoft game posters are pretty jarring in context, but there aren't that many of them.

So, I'm off to try some single player non-campaign missions on the first map. Will report back.

Roscoe · Post by **Roscoe** » Wed Feb 15, 2006 9:28 pm

Update after second mission:

Oh, it does get better

.

Sneaking around in an Algerian hotel and outside in the alleys. Lots of bad guys around with assault rifles and a couple of RPGs

. Some people have complained that including a quick save option is against the spirit of R6, but you're going to need it for this game unless you are some kind of FPS wunderkind. Again, the design and detail of the levels are outstanding.

Damn, some bad news on the non-campaign mission options. I played a couple of tango hunts on the first two missions and they only include the first map of the level in each mission, which sucks a bit. Tangos aren't rocket scientists but it is fun.

Punisher · Post by **Punisher** » Wed Feb 15, 2006 9:41 pm

Roscoe wrote:
First of all, yes, it does employ Starforce. Yes, I know that causes some people havoc. Me, I have an internal hard drive, three internal optical drives including a CD burner, an external DVD burner, three external drives, Alchohol 120% and Nero virtual disks and Starforce didn't bother them at all.

Well, that kills it for me. I haven't gotten a single Starforce game to work on my system since it's x64, other then one where I had to use a special method. I don't think the Starforce drivers work on x64 I guess.

Hetz · Post by **Hetz** » Wed Feb 15, 2006 9:48 pm

Every single time I have installed a game that has Starforce on it , it has royally fucked up my system (random reboots, strange errors with my CD/DVD drives etc...) I remove the Starforce, with the Starforce removal tool (once I had to format the drive to get the shit off my system) and all the problems go away.

I refuse to buy any game that has Starforce on it now. That means, no Ubisoft games for me, since they are pretty much the only ones that use it..

Roscoe · Post by **Roscoe** » Wed Feb 15, 2006 10:34 pm

I completely sympathize with people with Starforce problems. In the past I've run up against games that simply would not run for some reason or another. Very irritating.

Oh, one weird graphics issue. Some special illumination effect that's from bright sunlight or other light in the game sometimes generates reflections that can be seen through walls. Very odd, but no effect on the gameplay itself.

Thin_J · Post by **Thin_J** » Wed Feb 15, 2006 11:11 pm

Windows95 wrote:Swat 4 is bad for this. The last patch did little for the game but added a util that downloads new ads online and places them in the game. If they want to use my internet access to download ads, I better see a serious price drop in the game. I'm not paying full price for a game that then forces unwanted ads on me.

That's actually pretty easily fixed. You can force your computer to not allow the ads to be downloaded.

That being said: Lockdown absolutely sucks. I played the Xbox version and the PC Demo was identical. You can stand out in the open for ten minutes and not get shot, but if you sneak around and peak your head around a corner they'll put a bullet between your eyes.

It's absolutely ridiculous.

Lord_Pall · Post by **Lord_Pall** » Fri Feb 17, 2006 11:26 am

Any idea if you need 2 copies to do coop lan?

I know it's mediocre, and a big middle finger to the Rainbow 6 license, but me and my wife have been playing the hell out of Swat 4, so another tactical shooter wouldn't hurt (we tried raven shield, she didn't care for it, and ghost recon is a little clunky nowadays)