Spontaneous Sunday: Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas

For this week's Spontaneous Sunday, I have played Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas (2006, Ubisoft, Xbox 360).

"Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas is the sixth game in the Rainbow Six series of video games. It was released for the Xbox 360 on November 21, 2006. The game's storyline follows a new Rainbow team that is dispatched to Las Vegas, Nevada to defeat international terrorist Irena Morales and her army of mercenaries that is repeatedly attacking key locations in the city."

- Wikipedia on Rainbow Six Vegas

What do I expect?

This is the first and only Tom Clancy game that I have played. As a complete beginner to the franchise, I'm going in somewhat blind, though I have seen and read quite a bit about the franchise. I expect it to be a first-person shooter with tactical or strategic elements and perhaps several approaches to missions and different paths through levels.

I expect that the game's Las Vegas setting will allow for some pretty impressive environments and set-pieces. While conducting research on game environments for one of my assignments last semester, I read a book that contained a case-study about the level design of Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, and it gave an in depth analysis of how much consideration went into one of the levels in the game, so I expect that Rainbow Six Vegas will also have some high-quality level design.

I expect the game to have quite a serious tone and story. I also expect that it may have some stealth elements to it.

First Impressions - What do I think of the game in its first few minutes?

The game begins with a start screen of the game's logo and the camera sweeping around above Las Vegas' skyline, accompanied by serious and tense music. Left idle for a minute or so, a demo/ cinematics plays showing cutscene-style firefights, gameplay and some of the game's characters. This video is pretty dramatic and gives me high hopes for the game and an idea of what to expect.

Shot from the demo cinematic

The front end menu is simple and effective, if a bit unadventurous. I started a new game and chose normal difficulty. The first level actually takes place in Mexico rather than Vegas and begins with the player character in a helicopter en-route to a mission site while being briefed for the mission. My first thought was that the graphics are better than I expected from a game that is eleven years old. Arriving at the drop-off point, my character zip lined down into a back street and the action began. My first objective is to regroup with my team, and the game began to cover the basics of taking cover, shooting from cover, flanking enemies and so on. I realised at this point that taking cover and tactical movement would be a big focus of the gameplay - which makes sense, as its a realistic shooter.

Start of level 1, before being dropped into action.

I also noticed that the environments also look really good for a 2006 game. Things such as dust particle effects, warm lighting, detail objects and presence of ambient audio and a distant radio playing Mexican music all added to the environments authenticity. This first level does a good job of introducing the main gameplay systems by offering lots of cover, different routes to take and opportunities to try out silenced weapons and the "snake cam", a small camera used to see under doors.

Introduction to basic cover mechanics.

The Snake Cam allows you see under doors and plan your attack.

It wasn't long before I had rendezvoused with my squad on the roof of a church and began learning how to give them commands such as moving around, following or holding position and interacting with things. My squad and I reached a train-yard, took out some enemies then rappelled into a lower level and the next level began.

The AI team mates are actually very useful.

Overall it was a good start to the game. The early game visuals and environment were nice, and the mechanics were well-introduced. The only negatives that I picked up on is that there is no sprint or jump ability which makes movement feel a bit wooden, and the filter applied to the screen when your health is low makes the screen look like it has motion blur and isn't very easy on the eye. 

What do I like about the game? What does it do well?

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas has a lot going for it and, in many ways, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the graphics and the variety and depth of the mechanics. I can imagine that, upon its release in 2006, the game will have been very well received.

A casino is a very interesting setting for an FPS game.

The game's graphics are definitely one of its strongest features. The characters, weapons, vehicles and environments all look very realistic for a game from 2006 - they may be the best graphics I've seen in a game of this age. With the game being primarily set in Las Vegas, there's also a lot of interesting sights to see. I've never seen a casino environment in an FPS before and it works really well, with brightly lit and colourful casino floors aswell as vaults and back corridors. The environments also feature lots of destructible objects and glass to shatter which adds an even greater sense of chaos to the already-hectic gameplay.

The camera switches seamlessly from 1st to 3rd person in cover.

The gameplay is also pretty solid and theres a lot of quite interesting mechanics at work. The squad control system is a particularly strong mechanic and is somewhat similar to the system in Brothers In Arms: Road To Hill 30 (reviewed a couple of Sundays ago), but Rainbow Six Vegas pulls it off better.

You can have your squad follow you or move of their own accord, take cover, attack in different ways and breach doors and they always act well to what you need them to do. Squad control systems can often be awkward and annoying to use, and AI team mates can sometimes be liabilities rather than helpful, but this is not the case in Rainbow Six Vegas. This feature, along with the opportunity to approach and navigate areas in different ways, also adds something of a tactical element to the game that helps to set it apart from other similar games. Other strong mechanics include rappelling and the "snake cam".

The level design is another positive point, and its clear that the designers have put a lot of consideration into the levels so that they play well to the game's core mechanics and offer a lot of choice in terms of routes and play styles. You can use a tactical map that shows the level's layout so you can choose which routes to take, and see enemy and ally positions and interactable objects and use this information to inform your choices in the game.

Another good feature is the variety of weapons and equipment at your disposal, and the different opportunities that these provide. You have access to a wide range of guns including assault rifles, snipers and machine guns and you can customise them with attachments. You also get gear such as grenades, breaching charges and flash bangs that add even more variety to the gameplay and allows you to switch up your play style.

The Outfitting menu allows you to choose weapons and gear.

What do I not like?

For all its positive points, Rainbow Six Vegas is not without its downsides. Firstly, theres a few things that lead me to believe that the game lacks replay value. The missions offer only the main, critical-path objectives. With no bonus objectives or collectables hidden around the levels, there will be little to motivate the player to replay the level. The missions don't have scores or any ending stats to speak of. If there was a score system or even a simple "Gold, Silver, Bronze" performance grade, this would add a lot of replay value. Also, some of the levels are very big with lots of offshoot rooms and little areas that would be perfect for a hidden item but instead feel sadly like wasted space.

Another downside is that the game doesn't do enough to ground its story or the motivation behind the action that occurs. Aside from some dialogue that occurs before and sometimes during the missions, its hard to tell what the overall reason for the characters being there is. Without a good idea of whats going on in the story, the game loses a bit of its impact. This problem could be solved with the simple addition of a short paragraph on the pause menu that allows the player to quickly check the back story of the mission.

Theres also the rather minor issue of the lack of a sprint or jump ability, which makes the player character feel a little bit clunky and powerless. Finally, the inventory system could probably be better, as you have to hold buttons and select with the directional pad to change to your secondary weapon or change your equipped grenade, which, in the heat of battle, can be distracting.

Final Thoughts

Overall, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas is really quite a high quality game. It offers some really good graphics and environments, interesting mechanics and gameplay possibilities, AI team members that are actually useful, varied weapons and a healthy degree of tactical choice. The lack of replay value and story establishment does take something away though and the game feels like it has a very slight lack of substance. Nevertheless, the positives outweigh the negatives to make this a good game.

Learning Blueprints - "Shoot The Red Guys" - Simple UE4 FPS

I'm excited to announce that I have finished my first fully playable UE4 game today. Over the past couple of weeks I have worked my way through a book titled "Blueprints Visual Scripting for Unreal Engine" by Brenden Sewell that I found in the library.

"Blueprints Visual Scripting for Unreal Engine is a step-by-step approach to building a fully functional game, one system at a time. Starting with a basic First Person Shooter template, each chapter will extend the prototype to create an increasingly complex and robust game experience. You will progress from creating basic shooting mechanics to gradually more complex systems that will generate user interface elements and intelligent enemy behavior."

Basically it's a step-by-step guide to creating a simple FPS game in UE4! I did this because I had basically no experience with Blueprints at all and this was a huge gap in my knowledge and skillset that was long due filling in. Having these new skills opens up so many possibilities, both for my academic persuits and my future personal projects.

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I have called my game "Shoot The Red Guys" (for obvious reasons) and it is really rather simple, but fully functional. It is a round-based shooter in which you have to destroy a set number of enemies which increases with each round. Here's a quick rundown of the features, most of which are from the steps in the book, but some are my own additions that I created with the skills that the book taught me. It was all created with just the UE4 starter content.

• A small, basic playable area modelled loosely on a shipping container yard.
• Enemies with AI that spawn at random locations, wander around, track down, chase and attack the player.
• A health meter that depletes when attacked by enemies. I also created health pickups that refill your health and respawn after some time.
• Limited player ammo and ammo pickups that spin, emit light and respawn after a short time.
• The ability for the player to zoom in their aim and sprint.
• Pause, victory and failure screens with working save, restart round and new game functions.
• Rounds that increase in difficulty by adding a higher score requirement and more enemies spawning in.
• The round system is set up in a way that means that the game can, in theory, carry on indefinitely, only limited by player skill.
• Audio for destroying enemies, taking damage and picking up ammo and health.
• An HUD showing health, stamina, score, ammo and the current round.

Here's a video of some gameplay of the game.

So what do I hope to achieve with the skills that I have learned here? My area of focus for my MA degree is Atmosphere in Games, with my pratical work being 3D environment art. I figure that an environment can only get to a certain level of atmosphere without gameplay, so I am planning to use these skills to add some level of gameplay or interactivity to my future environment art projects. These skills are also useful to have because I can build upon them and eventually get to a point where I may be able to make an indie game for commercial release, or use them within a games company. I may also take this game further and turn it something more in the future.

Spontaneous Sunday: Plants vs. Zombies

Welcome to another Spontaneous Sunday! This week, I have played Plants vs. Zombies (2010, PopCap Games, Xbox Live Arcade (Xbox 360)).

"Plants vs. Zombies is a tower defense video game developed and originally published by PopCap Games for Microsoft Windows and OS X. The game involves a homeowner using a variety of different plants to prevent an army of zombies from entering their house and "eating their brains"."

- Wikipedia on Plants vs. Zombies

What do I expect from the game?

Being such a popular and accessible game, Plants vs. Zombies is a game that it is difficult not to be aware of to some degree, so I have seen and read a bit about it and have a good idea of what to expect. It is a 2D tower defence game where the "towers" are various different plants and the advancing enemies are zombies. It seems to be fairly simple, though I'm sure great effort has been made to make it a varied game with a long lifespan. I like the look of the art style. I expect it to be a charming, casual, and fast-paced tower defence game.

First Impressions - What did I think of the game in its first few minutes?

The start screen is instantly colourful and visually appealing, and there is a lot to look at. The front end is equally colourful and has diegetic options. When starting a new game, the game's title is briefly shown over a clip of a rather busy level with many different plant and enemy types. This was a smart move by the developers, as the first few levels, in which you will learn the basics with only starter plants and enemies, will be less chaotic and might not hook the player. By showing how the game can look later on, it gives the player a hint of things to come and makes them more likely to see the early game through. 

The first level sees the player learning the basics of placing plants and the structure of the game, with starting with just one plant type and one lane and slowly adding more. By level 3, you have 4 plant types and all 5 lanes open. It feels a bit slow to get going and there wasn't much of a sense of danger in the early levels, though this is understandable as the player should know what they're doing before being overly challenged.

Level 1

Level 2

At the end of level 3, I unlocked a shovel that can be used to dig up plants to clear space, and a character called Crazy Dave appeared to tell me about how to use it. He has a beard, a Homer Simpson-esque outfit and a pan on his head and talks gibberish. This guy was instantly charming. To see a human character after only having seen plants and zombies until now added something of a human interest to the game and made it easier to connect with.

Crazy Dave

I dug up some plants at Crazy Dave's request, and he introduced me to the bowling game mode which involves bowling walnuts at advancing zombies and was pretty fun. By the next level, I had unlocked a decent arsenal of plants and the shovel. New enemy types had begun to appear and the game felt like it was properly under way.

What do I like? What does it do well?

I have plenty of good things to say about Plants vs. Zombies. It is pretty much exactly how I expected it. That is to say, it is a charming tower defence game that is simple, but still varied and offers plenty of content. The overall aesthetic and art style is perhaps its most immediately appealing feature. It is full of colour and nicely designed anthropomorphic plants that all have a lot of character. The UI, menus and levels are all consistent in their art style and this makes for a very nice looking game overall. The audio and music are good and suit the game well.

The game features an "Suburban Almanac" of information on plants and zombies.

The gameplay is pretty solid, with a reasonable learning curve, pace and variety. It starts out a little bit slow while the player is learning the ropes, but soon enough you have a wide variety of plants and face different enemies. There are also different game modes thrown into the mix every now and then which keep the player on their toes. The pace at which things are unlocked and new challenges appear is nicely balanced in a way that keeps the game interesting and encourages extended play. This is a characteristic of a mobile or PC app-style game, which, of course, Plants vs. Zombies started life as. 

The gameplay is perhaps not quite as frantic and chaotic as I had expected to begin with, but I only played for a few hours, so I imagine it gets more chaotic later on. The structure of rounds and core gameplay systems are easy to grasp. Again, this is probably thanks to its roots as a PC app-style  game, which are carefully designed to be accessible to a wide audience.

The game gets more colourful and interesting with each round.

One of the game's biggest strengths is its amount of content, regular rewards and incentive to keep playing. Unlocks include new plant types, new locales, and new enemies to add more colour and gameplay to the mix. 

This week also saw a Spontaneous Sunday first: two player! I roped my girlfriend, Chloe,  into playing two player with me. Plants vs. Zombies features some new game modes including co-op in which both players fend of the zombies with each player placing different plants, and vs. mode in which one player defends as the plants and the other attacks as the zombies. The addition of these multiplayer modes adds so much more variety of gameplay and longevity to the game. It's also an example of how the developers added to the game's original mobile iteration to make it suit the Xbox Arcade platform.

Co-Op Mode.

Additional game-modes.

What don't I like?

I don't have many negative things to say about Plants vs. Zombies, though one negative point is that it doesn't seem to "introduce itself" well. The gameplay seems a bit too immediate. The addition of a short cutscene before a new game would make the start of the game seem more grounded. Or maybe Crazy Dave could be visible on the front end.Another very minor negative is that the music becomes repetitive after an hour or two of playing.

Night-time levels see new plant types and a different approach to play.

Final Thoughts

Overall, Plants vs. Zombies is a very good game and its clear to see how it has established so much popularity with critics and players, and how it has gone on to be released on so many platforms. Its got a nice style, and is quick, rewarding and accessible. The aesthetic, gameplay and lore of the game are all well thought-out.

It may be a bit too casual of game for my taste, and as far as tower-defence games go, World of Van Helsing: Deathtrap is more my speed, but I would happily play Plants vs. Zombies again in the future.

Spontaneous Sunday: Brothers In Arms: Road To Hill 30

Welcome to another Spontaneous Sunday! This one is a bit late as it was my birthday on Monday so I've had a busy weekend. This week I played Brothers In Arms: Road To Hill 30 (2005, Gearbox Software, Ubisoft, Playstation 2). I bought it from a market stall for £2 last week.

"Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 is a first-person shooter video game developed by Gearbox Software and published by Ubisoft for Xbox, Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 2 and OS X. It is the first game in the Brothers in Arms series. The game takes place during World War II and focuses on tactics."

- Wikipedia on Brothers In Arms: Road To Hill 30

What do I expect from the game?

Brothers In Arms: Road To Hill 30 is a WW2 first-person shooter from 2005, which is arguably the "golden era" of WW2 shooters, which is to say that they were very common and popular and generally performed well commercially. I played quite a few games of this genre, but I never owned a Brothers In Arms game. I expect Road To Hill 30 to share many similarities with other similar games in terms of gameplay, style/aesthetic, narrative and level design. I expect linear, objective-based levels, 

Road To Hill 30 promises a "digitally accurate reproduction of Normandy 1944", which interests me as I am into WW2 history. So I expect convincing environments, weapons and levels. With it being an old game, I expect it to have some issues such as dated graphics and unrefined controls.

First Impressions - What do I think of the game in its first few minutes?

I launched the game and was met with the title screen as seen above. The front end is pretty simple, with a 3D landscape as its background and quite minimalistic appearance, with some subtle, barely audible music. Its not a particularly exciting greeting. The game looks pretty retro right from the off. Selected menu options have a red line underneath them which is stylistically reminiscent of the film The Thin Red Line - this was the first of many examples of Road To Hill 30 being inspired by war films.

I started the first mission, which takes place 8 days after D-Day and sees the main character's unit on the losing side of a fire-fight before being hit by a tank and fading to black. The game then goes back to June 6th. So the end of the game is seen at the start, which is another feature borrowed from films and TV. Cutscenes and level intros are accompanied by narration from the player character. The narration is always serious and bleak and this is the tone that game is trying to set for itself, rather than a bravado-filled, patriotic affair.

Title card for the intro mission - looks very film-y!

Shot from the prelude mission.

Following the intro segment, credits play over a cutscene of photographs, postcards and documents in another example of film-like feature. The next mission begins with the night-time Allied airdrops into Normandy in the early hours of D-Day, before the beach landings. Your plane is shot down forcing your character to drop early. It's a fairly exciting and convincing series of events. You find yourself in an unknown area, unarmed and needing to meet up with the rest of your squad. Once this is achieved, the player gets a pistol and is shown the basics of shooting.

Shot of the opening credits.

The mission then sees you fight some enemies, meet up with more squad members, and destroying some enemy artillery pieces. It's a simple intro that ticks all the boxes in terms of introducing you to basic movement and combat, but it can't be said to be terribly exciting as far as first levels go and theres nothing much that sets it apart from other WW2 games. The UI is simple and familiar-looking. One nice feature of the UI is that it gives an arrow on the compass for the objective, and as you get closer to it, a yellow outline spreads around the compass from the arrow and meets itself when you reach the objective.

Situational Awareness view.

The first mission also introduces the "Situational Awareness" mechanic, which pauses gameplay and takes the camera into a top-down perspective that allows you to survey the battlefield and see the locations of enemies, objectives and allies. This is an interesting and refreshing mechanic that I've not seen before and adds a tactical element to the game. I played a few more levels that involved such things as destroying enemy mortar teams, clearing roads and defending against counter-attacks.

What do I like about the game? What does it do well?

Brothers In Arms: Road To Hill 30 has some nice features that help it to stand out. The game's narrative tone and influence from war films makes it feel mature and serious, though it sometimes lays it on a bit thick.

Road To Hill 30's biggest strength is in its unique mechanics. The game has mechanics that offer and encourage tactical approaches to missions, such as Situation Awareness, commanding soldiers and suppressing enemies. The Situational Awareness mechanic allows you to view the area from a top-down perspective and plan out your moves. You are also able to command friendly soldiers, and this mechanic is really useful and intuitive. You can command soldiers to move to locations, take cover, fire on specific enemies, follow you and charge enemies. This feature plays a big role in most missions and really shapes the way that the game plays. It also adds a level of realism to the combat.

The tutorial for the squad control system.

Another strong mechanic is the suppression mechanic, which involves shooting at enemies in cover to suppress them and stop them from firing on you so you and your squad can advance. It's another mechanic that adds a tactical element and realism to the combat, though it often results in combat degenerating to both sides taking pot shots which can get boring. Nevertheless, these mechanics help to set the game apart from its contemporaries and makes for some interesting tactical gameplay. The level design is clearly well considered to provide an environment where these mechanics can shine, with multiple routes and flanking opportunities.

The game's 3D models, particularly the weapons and vehicles, are quite well done considering the game's age. As a 3D modeller myself and a fan of the low-poly art style seen in PS2-era games, I found myself examining many of the 3D models.

Finally, another thing that I liked about the game was the box art and the design of the packaging and manual. With the ever-increasing popularity of purely digital games and in-game manuals, I think that physical game manuals and box contents are becoming a lost art form! The game comes with a manual that is modelled after a WW2 military file, with images of characters, descriptions of weapons etc. You also get a poster than on one side has a map of Normandy and timeline of events and on the other side, a comic-style image showing the process of flanking an enemy.

What don't I like about the game?

Though the game offers some unique and fairly innovative mechanics, it has a number of issues and shows its age in some key ways. Firstly, theres the controls, which feel very dated and often don't make much sense and are clearly from a time before FPS controls became the refined, streamlined layouts seen in games today. For example, shooting is mapped to R1, and aiming is mapped to R3. Movement is also clunky and awkward. Aiming is hard as the movement of the weapon has only one speed so its difficult to make slight adjustments to your aim - which is bad because a lot of the combat involves trying to hit enemies who are mostly obscured by cover.

The game's mission types and objectives aren't very exciting or innovative. The levels are based on real events, which is commendable, but I feel like the level designers could have done more with the scenarios to make each level more exciting. Also, there are no health pickups and no health regeneration in the game, so you basically have to complete each mission on one health bar, though if you die enough times, you do get the option to respawn with replenished health, but this doesn't make up for the lack of health regen.

Your fellow soldiers, the use of which is often pivotal to success in a level, are very easily killed and sometimes take dangerous routes which end up getting them killed. They can't be revived, meaning that once they're down, you have to complete the level without them. This makes the levels very difficult because they are designed to be completed with the help of AI allies! Also, because of the need to suppress enemy positions and move up carefully, it can be tedious to advance through levels if you keep getting pinned down. This is pretty realistic, but doesn't always make for exciting gameplay.

Finally, theres a few technical issues. In areas with a lot of content or long sight-lines, there can be some rather noticeable drops in frame-rate. The game came out towards the end of the Playstation 2's life cycle, so its possible that the art assets and graphics pushed the system to its limit, causing the frame-rate issues. The fire particle effect in the game is noticeably low-quality, with too few key frames for it to appear realistic and it really sticks out. The game's flowing water also looks low quality. The audio is also not great, with the weapon sounds lacking punch and sounding weak. The game doesn't have much in the way of music either.

Final Thoughts

I have mixed feelings about Road To Hill 30. While it has some really strong mechanics that I'm surprised weren't borrowed by other FPS games, the gameplay is generally a bit slow and at times tedious and awkward. There's also the issues that came with it being an old game such as the dated  controls, clunky gameplay and aiming, and the poor audio and particle effects which let it down, possibly to the point of out-weighing the game's positive points.

With all that said, the game was well received by both critics and players when it released in 2005, so my negative opinions are likely due to being used to the refined modern FPS games. FPS games have definitely come a long way since Brothers In Arms: Road To Hill 30. I'm not sure if I would play it again, but I would be interested in playing some later games in the series to see how it progressed and whether it managed to keep up with times and iron out its issues.