Replaying Rainbow Six: Vegas all these years later I can say that some things hold up incredibly well and others have aged poorly. To start with the positives the sound effects for the guns are still some of the best I have heard. The effects for when bullets hit different types of surfaces are also fantastic and varied. The gun play itself is still very satisfying. There are a wide range of weapons to choose from that can be accessorized to suit your play style. You can choose to silence most weapons and can choose the rate of fire for most weapons. Managing your team is mostly a fun affair as you can choose to have them enter rooms or use flash bangs and breaching charges. You can also specify which enemies they target; order them to move where you want; and choose their ROE. Keeping on the team aspects, the AI is not holding up well. Unless I micro manage my team to the extreme they make very poor choices including sitting out in the open and not seeking cover. The enemy AI isn’t much better as they can watch me shoot a enemy mere feet from them and as long as I used a silencer they act as if they have no idea what just transpired. They will also sometimes yell to comrades about not being able to see me even though it is a tight hallway with clear line of sight to me; they are shooting at me; and are alone with no comrades to hear them. The voice acting was decent at best but repetitive and unvaried at worst for the terrorists. The graphics haven’t aged very well either. The game came out during a time when many shooters had a brown tinge to them and Vegas is no exception. That looks even uglier now and is a real shame because the city of Las Vegas could have had much more colour to it. Facial detail and object detail held up alright but clothing detail is pretty poor. The game had an issue where a certain event wasn’t triggered at the right time so I failed the mission. I was supposed to fend off a wave of terrorists before pursuing Irena and basically unless I stayed in a small area of the room I would fail and she would escape but if I stayed put and fended them off from that spot it would allow me to pursue her. The fact that bugs like this exist fifteen years after launch is sad and shows what could be achieved if more games were open source. I also didn’t like how when I reach gear drops where I can pick new gear or get more ammo it defaulted my options for suppressor and fire rate each time.
I played Vegas on Linux using Proton. It never crashed on me and I didn’t notice any graphical bugs or glitches during game play but there was one issue during cut scenes. When the game would display the date and location over a black screen it wouldn’t stretch the whole screen and so it looked weird. There were five graphics options and a v-sync toggle. Alt-tab worked. The game would auto save at checkpoints and there was only one save slot. I found this very annoying as many checkpoints were poorly spaced apart and having to listen to dialogue and choose my gear over and over. You can’t change the difficulty after starting a game without restarting the whole game. I couldn’t monitor frame rate but I didn’t feel any lag.
Game Engine: Unreal 3
Disk Space Used: 6.25 GB
Game Version Played: 1.06.205
Graphics Settings Used: Hardware skin on; v-sync on; shadow quality high; motion blur off; 1920x1080
GPU Usage: 19-65 %
VRAM Usage: 941-1118 MB
CPU Usage: 15-28 %
RAM Usage: 3.2-4.3 GB
Overall the game play largely holds up and the issues are more on the technical side. I still enjoyed myself quite a bit and find this to be a superior shooter to many that are released these days. It has a great balance between tactical and care free as well as having far more options to suit different play styles than many other games in the genre. I paid $2.49 CAD from Steam for Vegas but I paid $49.99 CAD for the physical copy back in 2007 and in my view it is still worth $49.99 CAD. I finished the campaign on normal difficulty in 8 hours and 18 minutes.
My System:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 21.3.2 | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB | Manjaro 21.2.1 | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 5.15.12-1-MANJARO | Proton 6.3-8