May or may not be your kind of shooter
The addition of the cover system is nice and makes sense. You and your enemies constantly use cover, the game really stresses the use of the cover system into gameplay. It does feel weird taking cover at first, as you need to hold the left trigger to stay in cover, and be at the edge of whatever object you are covering behind and then hold a direction to lean out and fire. When you take cover, it switches to third person to allow better vision of your location and others. This makes me wish the whole game was in 3rd person, like Graw. Your squadmates don't seem to care much about taking cover, and the best you can do to keep them from standing in a hail of bullets is call them to regroup on you or tell them to move to a location. Making them move to cover doesn't usually help much, as most areas for taking cover only accommodate one person, so you end up with one guy standing behind a wall with the other standing next to him getting shot. Good thing your squad mates are pretty good shots. When you switch your weapon, your squadmates always do too. This makes little sense to me as if you are switching weapons it is usually to make up for range or firing type (for example, switching from a sniper rifle to a submachine gun to take out enemies at closer range). So if you want your team to use their long range guns, you do also, which can be a drag when trying to tactically advance on your enemies from multiple locations. Also the quick switch for your weapons is far from quick. I have died many times because I was rushed or flanked and emptied my clip on the enemies and then was forced to reload. If you are reloading, you cannot change weapons, so if you catch yourself before you reload, you have to deal with the 2 second wait time to switch your weapon. How tactical. Tapping the y button switches between your main firearms, you have to hold y and scroll to select your pistol or switch grenade types. Controlling your squad can be cumbersome. As I stated before telling them to take cover doesn't work well. When you tell them to stack on a door, if it is a double door, you can't get them to take both doors, they stack akwardly on one door. when they are stacked at a location, be it a door or repelling area, the game has you give further command through the directional pad. An area on your hud shows the command corresponding to the direction on the directional pad, or at least it shows you a little icon. The game never teaches you what the icons mean, and even after reading the manual I was giving incorrect orders. There have been times when I sent my squad to their death because I didn't know what the little lightning bolt command was. Words would have worked MUCH better than the picture icons. The available commands change when you change between infiltrate and assault. The command menus work kind of clunky. Oh, and you can't outfit your team. Who knows what weapons they will be using!
The single player levels are pretty uninspired. You've got your generic kill the terrorists storyline and a bunch of characters you never really care for. The maps are pretty linear, offering at most 2-3 ways of advancing, and these only come as different doors to a room to advance on your enemies from 2 sides. Thats how every level plays out, you fight a bunch of terrorists, go through some halls, use your snake cam, and figure out who goes through what door. If you are prompted to hack a computer or disarm a bomb, you are usually informed that there are tangos moving up on. How come they never see these guys coming till seconds before they are shooting at you? I want a better eye in the sky!
The multiplayer is much more appealing than the single player game, on any mode. Even on co-op, since human players seem to take cover and react accordingly. Not my favorite rainbow six game, but still one of the better tactical shooters around.