Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas [X360]

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 breath-taking graphics engine, smart gameplay, and full-featured multiplayer support, Ubisoft manages to reinvigorate the games that put the 'tactical' in tactical shooters.

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 have once again managed 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. It entirely proactive to 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.

In the single-player game, you're accompanied by AI teammates. A simple press of the A button orders them to make their way to the location of your cursor. They'll use cover and fend for themselves just fine. They'll do a great job of taking out enemies if you position them well, which makes them invaluable.

There's no planning phase, which used to be a trademark of Rainbow Six way back when. But there is the option to stack your team on a door and have them hold their position until you give a command to enter. You can use a Splinter Cell-style snake cam to peer under doors and call out targets for your team. This makes it easy to do simultaneous entries in contrived locations where terrorists are guarding their hostages in a room with a convenient pair of easily accessible entries. Also borrowed from Splinter Cell are some new acrobatics, such as rappelling down a surface backwards, upside down, and with your gun drawn. It looks pretty silly, but it's sometimes actually useful. You can also kick through windows, swinging in on a rope. From now on, every action game needs this.

The AI in Vegas, friendly and enemy, is outstanding for how well it uses the same bag of tricks as a human player: cover, blind firing, smoke, grenades, flanking, and cussing out loud. The voice work is great, from your team calling out reloads to the enemy's Spanish imprecations. Firefights play out differently enough that replaying an area almost never feels like replaying an area.