Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas [PS3]

The Rainbow Six games are back and better than ever. What Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter did for outdoor firefights, Rainbow Six: Vegas does for indoor firefights (or "close quarters battles," as its called by anyone who knows an MP5 from a UMP45). By giving Vegas a breathtaking graphics engine, smart gameplay, and full-featured multiplayer support, Ubisoft manages to reinvigorate the games that put the "tactical" in tactical shooters.

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It was looking pretty bleak after Rainbow Six: Lockdown. That sloppy action game was very nearly the death of this eight-year-old series. But Ubisoft has once again performed a minor miracle, thanks to the fine work of their Montreal Studio. Whether it's Myst, Prince of Persia, or Ghost Recon, it seems the Montreal crew are the go-to guys for not only reviving a moribund franchise, but for doing it so well that the games almost feel like a whole new genre.

The gunplay in Vegas is superlative. The cover system works even better than Gears of War, where sticking to cover is sometimes awkward. But here, you're only in cover as long as you hold down the left trigger. You're entirely proactive in pushing yourself into a corner or hunker down behind a wall. There's a feeling of pressing yourself into a defensive position rather than simply toggling it and letting the animation take over.

The movement stick lets you lean out from cover in any direction, but you can also blind fire, which is often all it takes in close quarters. It never gets old seeing an enemy charge your position and simply tapping the right trigger to stick your gun out and dispatch him with a short unaimed burst. An oddly placed obstacle, like a sandbag or crate, sometimes gets in the way when you should be able to hide or move somewhere. But for the most part, Rainbow Six Vegas has a wonderful organic sense for using the environment in a shoot-out.

Out of the box, the PS3's controller setup is a little odd. The shoulder buttons are set up strangely, putting the all-important fire controls in unfamiliar locations. After you've tried to pull up the map and accidentally lobbed a grenade into the middle of your team a couple of times, you'll be reaching for the config menu and looking for something a little more logical. Thankfully, it's there, and the game proves much more playable with the alternate layout that mirrors the Xbox 360's setup.

Vegas takes a swing at using the motion sensing capability of the Sixaxis controller to operate the game's snake camera, which lets you peer under doors to spot waiting foes. Does it work? No, not really. The shift from conventional FPS controls to motion-sensitive, Wii-style mechanics is too jarring. Rather than the immersive and natural sensation that is associated with motion controls, Vegas' half-and-half approach takes you right out of the atmosphere to being a guy sitting on a couch waving a piece of plastic. If your first action in the config menus is to switch to a less awkward button layout, your second should be to turn off the motion-sensitive snake cam system.