It’s hard to believe, but this is the first Rainbow Six game for the Xbox 360. I know, you probably thought Ghost Recon and Splinter Cell counted, but those are from other franchises. Personally I’m waiting for the Ghost Cell Splinter Rainbow Recon Six game myself, but I digress.

The story behind R6V is that your team is pursuing Irena Morales, who is well known as an international terrorist. You play the role of Team Leader Logan Keller who is responsible for bringing down Irena. Of course in order to win, you must use a combination of action and strategy, or as I like to call it, strategery.

You are able to give commands by using the A button or the d-pad. You can also use voice commands through your Xbox Live Communicator. The commands aren’t that indepth – usually you’re telling your group to move to a location, or to regroup back at a different location. You can also tell your group to focus on one specific bad guy or to clear a room.

R6 Vegas, in case you hadn’t already guessed, is not a run and gun game, and you find that out very early during a hostage rescue mission. Although the levels themselves are linear, how you complete the levels are not. Going back to the hostage rescue mission, you have multiple options – do you stay on the first floor and try to infiltrate upwards – or do you go around to the second floor and kick the door down, guns blazing. The method you choose does affect the level, so choose wisely!

Although you do seem to die quite a bit in this game, I tend to look at it as a simulator – each level has so many options you can find out what tactics work and what tactics don’t. Just when you walk to a door – you can use a snake cam to see what’s going on at the other side of that door. Then you can make a decision on how to proceed – making the wrong decision will probably kill you – but then you can play again and try option number two. The weapons and gadgets that you can select from are realistic – no fantasy weapons here.

In addition to the weapons, there’s a lot of spy tactics involved. You can rappel off a building and crash into a window to attack. It’s very cool and a lot of fun.

Single player gameplay doesn’t last very long but there’s plenty of replay value here through the multiplayer co-op and online “adversarial” modes. There are plenty of match types to choose from and the co-op mode is a lot of fun.

In many team based games, the sending out of commands can drain all the fun out of the game because you won’t have time to get into the action yourself. This is definitely not the case with R6V. Your teammates aren’t horribly stupid, but you do need to keep an eye on them to make sure they follow through with your commands.