Review: Rainbow Six Lockdown

There probably are some cool games whose publishers are not just money-grabbing suits. Recently, I’m having a legitimate feeling that all of it is heading for the abyss because the amount of bad games is growing. Another game that didn’t make that feeling go away is Lockdown, a travesty that dares to bear the name Rainbow Six, a mark of serious, advanced tactical games. And some even paid money for it.

I guess the dumbed-down game system, which was once known for its series of tactical planning, selection of members, jumping into the skin of your fellow men and one-bullet-you-die gameplay, succumbed to the arcade guidelines of new times, written especially for gamers with monkey brain. They’ll probably be jumping from joy, because R6 has mutated into a run-and-gun shooter. The only sign of tactics in this game is when you have to point at the door of next room and issue the command that moves your colleagues into the room. They check it and do everything by themselves. Or when it’s necessary to place yourself behind the wall, so that you don’t exactly look like a target at the fair. Although it's usually enough to walk freely down the corridors and through the door, and when you see the enemy, keep the trigger squeezed until he falls down. But even a five-year-old, who would like to be Rambo and slaughter turban-wearing terrorist, will realize that screaming bad guys don’t possess any kind of artificial intelligence.

They are just puppets that can’t shoot you from one meter away. Your fellow soldiers are not much better. If you issue some complicated and demanding maneuver, they’ll just stand there or start bumping into random objects. If they hadn’t been such accurate marksmen, I’d be happy to put a bullet in them. You can forget about recoil, bullets that hit or affect certain parts of body, or any kind of progress made by the advancement of the genre.

Instead of respecting its heritage, Lockdown is linear, limited, with boring story that connects similar-looking corridors, rooms, tunnels and streets, where half of bad guys are eliminated by your colleagues thanks to their robot reflexes, and the other half is killed by you from astonishing distance. It doesn’t matter if you aim with machine-gun or your super hand pistol with unlimited ammo.

It’s inexorably stupid, even if you take it as an arcade. The situation gets worse when bugs or some other stupidity kicks in; like when certain scripted events don’t load because you didn’t open the door all the way or when enemies stand in front of one door when you jump in through the other. The game should’ve been forgotten, but like I said, it bears the name Rainbow Six, which was defined by realism, ruthlessness and tactics. This one is seriously bad; maybe because the development team just didn’t want to bother, or (my money’s on this) the publisher is a money-grabbing suit.