SimHQ.com - Land Combat Zone - Review: Rainbow Six: Lockdown

Well the first thing you should always do, game play wise, with any new game is check out the tutorials. Well the only tutorial in Lockdown is one map with a nicely laid out gun range. You can then try any and all guns that are included. This is a lot by the way. By rough estimates you have about 12 assault rifles, 10 sub machine-guns, 4 heavy machine guns, and 6 shotguns. You also have pistols (about 6 of them) and machine pistols (about 4 of them), and 2 secondary shotguns. And to add to that you have a couple of weapons exclusive just for online play. You also have attachments for most of these weapons like scopes, high cap mags, and suppressors.
To be honest with you, I like that there's tons of weapons too choose from, but for the most part each one fires about the same for its class of weapon. Sure there's a big difference between an assault rifle, a shotgun, and a machine gun. But within the same class of weapons there really isn't that much difference that I could tell.
Don't forget you also get some nice toys to play with as a member of Team Rainbow. You get your typical flash bangs and grenades, along with some breaching C4, but your team also gets a hammer for smashing down doors, or a shotgun made for taking doors down by the hinges. Both cool to see in action, in game, (and in real life I might add.)

After all that extensive training, you're ready for the campaign. In game, you are Domingo "Ding" Chavez, one of the stars in Tom Clancy's books, movies, and the computer game series. (Isn't it way past due for Ding to retire already?). You are the leader of six; you have three others with you. Who they are is chosen for you at the start of each mission, but it's not the same three all game long. This will come in handy; in most missions you can lose all your teammates and complete the mission, because you, Ding, know it all, and have all their skills too. Those damn terrorist are at it again, they stole some virus called "Legion", and have made it into a weapon. You and your team are sent in to kill the terrorist and get that stuff back. The campaign is 16 missions long, once you complete a level, that map is opened up for you in other single player modes. Each mission has a number of sub-levels. You and your team have to complete a sub-level from start to finish making it to an exit point, where the next sub-level loads. Do this about 3 to 5 times per mission and you'll finally complete a mission. The maps and levels are beautiful and well made, and vary in different locations, but the game is geared for you to follow a single path, a path of death and destruction, because within each level there appears to be hundreds (a figure of speech) of terrorist, and only very occasionally is there a civilian or two, besides the hostages you might have to rescue. There are so many bad guys in this game that I have had to force myself to go into single shot mode to conserve ammo, since my squad mates are not much of a help (explained later in this review).

The locations for the single player are plenty and different from one another. You'll start in South Africa, inserted by helicopter on the parking garage rooftop; yes this is the demo mission. You'll go through the garage, and then through some buildings, a courtyard, then more buildings reaching a bank. Then you'll visit other exotic locations, and kill more bad guys, like Algeria, a desert village, Amsterdam, Catacombs, caves, tunnels, buildings, towns, and a hospital. You'll crash the NATO summit too. You get the picture, a lot of locations, a lot of maps, all different in their own rights, but unfortunate the paths are all one way. From point A to point B. You'll have to clear rooms and buildings, you'll have to clear tunnels and underground fortresses, and you'll even get some fresh air with some more open desert town type maps. Red Storm/Ubisoft gets a plus for the choices of locations, the difference between those locations, and the overall look and feel of each location. You'll continue through the campaign, what is lost from the series is the planning phases of the game, since it's so one way, you don't need to plan, you can't pick how you would do it, you have to follow the gantlet.

You do get to equipment your team as you see fit. Select a character and a screen will bring up their stats, uniforms and equipment and even tell you a little about them. You can then change any or all that you want from that screen, another nice layout done by the developers.

Once you've unlocked a map you can decide to have some fun. You can do a terrorist hunt, where you move through a level and wipe out all the bad guys. Which is pretty much what you do 80% of the time in the campaign.

You can do a reverse terrorist hunt, that is where they hunt you, or you can lone wolf each mission, which is what I'd prefer to do in the campaign, more on that later.

As with past Rainbow Six games, with all the extra types of play in single player, all the maps and locations, after finishing the campaign you have plenty of replay value if you want it.

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