An excellent game...
Unlike the original Rainbow Six games, Vegas takes on the theme of Lockdown via have no selection in squads, thus you really get into you characters instead of one soldier you picked. As well as not being to plan your attack, in the original RS games, you could plan how you would beat the situation, and enact your plan to hopefully reach victory, this also doesn't feature in Vegas, due to the levels being a lot larger.
Vegas starts you off in Mexico, trying to capture a woman named Irena, fighting your way through a small army of enemies, everything goes out the window and you extract, only to find things are worse in Vegas! Sent in there to restore order, everything merges into one storyline.
The weapons in this game, although limited, are extremely detailed, sound, looks, everything. Unfortunately, loading out in weapons only offers a small selection, so you may want to grab that P90 off that Merc you just killed, as you can't always grab it from a weapons cache, while adding to the realism, it's annoying to wait for that one weapon to appear.
Commanding your team is a big part of Vegas, and it works perfectly, while allowing you to order complex commands, it engages them with a few buttons, so there's no need to stop and start. This can also be done through youe Headset using certain commands, although it isn't always reliable in the heat of things. When your teamates takes too many hits, they go down and you have a time limit to revive them through ordering your other teamate to help or doing it yourself. Although, if you take too many hits (Vegas uses a Gears of War style health system) you die instantly without an option of revival, this can get annoying at times when you think of your team as super soldiers that are revived easily, and you die everytime a bullet comes close.
While being similar to Tom Clancy's other excellent tactical shooter, Ghost Recon, it uses a Gears of War style Cover System, exactly what you need to survive this game. While in cover, you can peek out and sneak off a few shots, or blindfire insanely. Your teamates aren't as perfect at using Cover though.
Live features some new things to anything on the 360, using the new Live Vision camera, you can imprint your face onto a skin, and play with it online, as you advance in rank, new unlocks become availible. While these are not massive upgrades (meaning you won't be getting beaten down by someone who owns these) they are nice things to have as you play through Vegas Online.
The AI is quite good, but non-comparable to AI in games such as FEAR, they run to cover, but do not respond to flanking, and almost seem to give up when a grenade lands next to them.
Vegas is an excellent game, not a ripoff of GRAW, nor GRAW 2 of a filler for that, btut a decent Rainbow Six game in it's own right, and sets the series back on track after the problems of Lockdown. While the game is quick and does keep you in the heat of combat, it is not the average run and gun game with some team commands stuffed in.