This game is an awesome and strong singleplayer. It could easily be the best tactical FPS singleplayer on the market.
Great stuff:
- very nice and exciting maps
- excellent gameplay
- enemy AI works great
- unlike GRAW that was too hard, the difficulty levels here are just about right. The game is difficult enough to challenge you but not to discourage playing
- it looks like a mix of the best things from Lockdown, GRAW, and some gadgetry from SC compiled in a very creative way
- excellent weapons feel and plenty of them: 6 pistols, 4 shotguns, 4 snipers, 9 assault rifles, 6 submachine guns, 5 light machine guns
- compared to its closest and most recent relative, R6 Lockdown, in Vegas you can combine various scopes and silencers at the same time rather than just one or the other as in Lockdown
- character creation is nothing revolutionary here, but it's a nice touch -- face features barely modifiable, but personal armor, clothes, etc. plenty
OK stuff:
- sound is very good and in some parts excellent. - graphics ... well, some say excellent and I say about average with lots of jagged edges and some serious blurring (and I use one of the best graphics cards on the market right now)
Bad stuff:
- multiplayer (needs a patch ASAP; for all practical purposes the multiplayer is currently dead)
- parts of console porting to PC too obvious -- selecting a silencer with directionally moving the mouse as mimicking a gamepad controller; video options obviously made for a standardazed xbox hardware with no variations in hardware options present on PCs, etc.
- limited resolutions and no support for widescreen -- I don't use widescreen but would expect a very common 17" & 19" LCD rez of 1280x1024 to be included
- video options: no AA, and HDR doesn't do enough
- AMD dual core processors may not perform very well without the optimization patch (November 2006 patch available at AMD site)
Overall, this is a great game (I'll give Ubi 2 weeks to fix the multiplayer before coming back here and reducing this score; funny tho, they issued 1.01 patch even before the game was released but unfortunately it didn't fix multiplayer). Exciting maps, loads of weapons combined with some tactical thinking and planning makes this game shine. If you are primarily a multiplayer person, you may want to wait and see till this malfunction is fixed, but if it ever gets fixed the multiplayer with ranks and points and multiple modes should be very exciting too.
Original Post: Posted Dec 14, 2006 7:34 pm PT
Revised: Nov 12, 2007