Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas moved the tactical shooter series to Las Vegas and added a third-person-style cover system around corners and obstacles, activated when approaching a wall, to the series' traditional emphasis on cover, planning your approach, and managing your team. Ubisoft Montreal thereby refreshed the series' older concept with more modern, more accessible action, without entirely abandoning the emphasis on tactics, scouting rooms with fiber-optic cameras, and coordinating with two Rainbow team squadmates. Weapons could be fitted with stocks, sights, and other attachments unlocked through progress in the campaign and multiplayer, giving players room to tailor their loadout to their own playstyle.

The PlayStation 3 version came out a few months after the original on Xbox 360, and at the time of release critics often rated it as slightly weaker technically — a lower frame rate and minor stutters during action were noticeable on the still lightly optimized PS3 hardware, especially in larger firefights with many enemies on screen at once, which players and period reviews cited as the port's main weakness compared to the earlier Xbox 360 release. In return, the game made use of the SIXAXIS controller: tilting the controller opened locks and performed certain contextual actions, a feature the Xbox 360 version did not offer, and one of the few genuinely exclusive features of this port.

Otherwise, content-wise it was the same game — the same campaign, the same weapons and multiplayer maps, only the online community was noticeably smaller due to the later launch, and players often had to wait longer for fully populated servers than on Xbox 360. For players who were only buying their first PlayStation 3 in 2007, however, Rainbow Six Vegas represented one of the first notable tactical shooters on the console and a solid reason to turn the console on at all, even acknowledging the minor technical shortcomings that set it apart from the somewhat more stable Xbox 360 version.

Why play it: Content-wise it's the same campaign and multiplayer as on Xbox 360, just with a somewhat smaller online community — but for early PlayStation 3 owners in 2007 it was a solid tactical shooter.