Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas

The latest edition in the Rainbow Six series takes the action to Las Vegas. The elite team of counter-terrorist, counter-hostage, and counter-everything officers are tasked with infiltrating huge casinos and other Vegas hot spots to stop hostage-takers, terrorists, and all other forms of evil.

Calm before the storm!

Like in Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, the events all play out in a linear storyline spanning only a few hours and when a mission is over, the player is taken straight into the next mission via helicopter and is briefed in-flight. There isn’t a mission briefing screen; there’s no time to study a map and spend a lot of time over minute details. This was something that was one of the defining elements of the previous Rainbow Six games. In Rainbow Six: Vegas, decisions are made on-the-fly and there will always be a new threat.

Rainbow Six: Vegas is more refined than other games featuring the same ability. You can repel downward at any speed you wish; you can stop to look into windows and even shoot at enemies through windows while repelling, and now, you can also flip upside-down and descend head-first, allowing you to control your weapon better and to shield most of your body from the window.

You can also be sneaky with repelling; it isn’t all about the shooting baddies through glass. You can snake the fiber-optic camera through windows and cracks to get a better look around, and while doing so you can target enemies and specify which of your teammates should attack whom for an amazingly orchestrated breach. This “enemy tagging” technique can be used at any time using the snake cam, including under doors, around corners, and so on.

Other gameplay features are wall-hugging, the ability to blind-fire out of corners or over cover (basically meaning sticking the gun up and shooting without the character being able to see what he’s aiming at), and some great team-based breaching maneuvers for getting through doors, across rooms, and other activities that become much more complicated when around any corner could be a mean guy with a gun.

Fantastic Four: Rise of The Silver Surfer

Keep up Flame-boy!

Well here we go again, another movie game. The four-player co-op is obviously the big draw factor to this game, and combat is arguably the more important feature. Fusion attacks lets two players team up to perform moves in tandem. When two characters are close together in single-player mode, you can switch between teammates on the D-pad (like in Ultimate Alliance). For example, you can create a psychic bubble with the Invisible Woman, and use the Human Torch to fill it with a fireball. You can then toss it at a group of enemies like napalm in a bag.

You increase the Fantastic Four’s abilities with experience that you gain from defeating enemies. There are six levels with 17 stages between them, and the plot is about 50 percent based on the upcoming movie, and 50 percent new material (with enemies from the comic book series). Between the newly added four-player combat and the Fusion Attacks, the developers have put a lot of effort into improving the multiplayer aspects of the game from the last Fantastic Four release.

Transformers: The Game

More than meets the eye!

Transformers: The Game not only will attempt to clear the name of the other lackluster Transformer titles, it also has to compete with the reputation created by other movie license games that have, more often than not, fallen on poor quality and rushed release dates. But for this game, we’re talking about massive robots who can transform into cars, jets, and helicopters. Hopefully it can overcome those obstacles.

Players choose to play through either an Autobot or a Decepticon story arch. As some of you may know, Autobots have a distinguished responsibility of protecting the human race from the Decepticons who destroy anything in their way while trying to reclaim the AllSpark (the mysterious object responsible for life on Cybertron, which is the home planet of the transformers) hidden somewhere in the suburbs. With fully destructible environments, and tons of other objects for you to pick up and throw around, the gameplay caters to the Decepticons at this point. You receive point penalties as an Autobot if you keep destroying everything around you, while you actually get rewarded for all of that as a Decepticon.

There’s a lot of Transformers coming at us from all directions. If you have a gaming machine, chances are you will have a chance to try out a version.