Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Lockdown (Xbox)

Multiplayer

If you’re playing offline you can enjoy the game with a friend or 3, system link for up to 16 players.

Cooperative mode can be played with friends, hunting down the terrorists in the singleplayer missions or Terrorist Hunt: where you can hunt down the Tangos and not have to worry about things like hostages and mission objectives.

Adversarial mode boasts the following game modes:

Team Survival where when you die, there are no respawns. Last team standing wins people!

Total Conquest where your team has to take control of all the satellite transmitters for a certain amount of time to win.

Retrieval: Like capture the flag only with bio-hazard containers.

Team Sharpshooter: Two teams must battle it out, the player with the most score wins for their team. A little like Team Deathmatch then.

These modes are available offline and online, but when you fire up the game online and hit LIVE you’re allowed to enter.

P.E.C. Mode (Persistant Elite Creation) and store your character data on the XB Live servers, taking kills, achievements and so on from game to game. This is a nice addition to the series and should feature in more games.

In PEC mode you can tailor your characters look and their specialisation, buy new equipment and with an RPG-style system upgrade/repair items that you have bought or scrounged. You can even upgrade your characters skills.

You can choose from:

Commando: Big guns, lots of big guns and can take major punishment.
Spec-Op: Sneaky specialists, they can use a knife to silence enemies.
Engineer: Electronics, countering traps and so on.
Medic: Patch up your team, earn the love of your fellow operatives.

This set up must owe something to Team Fortress and it made my heart sing to see it appear in a game again.

Online the game plays like Black Arrow and will provide a great deal of fun/challenge to the LIVE player. The PEC mode adds something new and gives a real reason for spending hours and hours learning the game, the maps are overall very good and they have a distinct feel to them.

Final Shot

There are some nice innovations in Lockdown and the team obviously had set themselves some high goals to meet, this is where I am of two-minds and neither is truly made up. When you have one step forward with this game, something else seems to take two steps back and as much as I hate to say it, Lockdown doesn’t feel as polished as it should. The animations have really let the series down this time around and they are often one of the keys to immersing the player into the game world – if you’re laughing at the chicken-footed run of some of the characters, you’re not concentrating on the game.

Still with all my minor prickles aside, the game is still engaging and fun and that should be the most important thing of all. I just can’t score it as highly as I did Black Arrow, as much as I’d like to – because of its short comings. Hopefully the developers will slow the pace down and return to a more tactical game for the next in the series, where no doubt we’ll have to shift the score-bar to accommodate the advances from the Xbox 360.

I’m more of a singleplayer fanatic than a multiplayer guru, but even I had fun in the online parts. I think PEC is the way to go, but at the moment for this game and I am sure someone out there will feel differently to me, it’s a nice addition but needs a lot more work to fully implement.