How to Play Rainbow Six Vegas

Rainbow Six Vegas isn’t your usual first-person shooter. You won’t be able to outjump and outrun your opponents with twitch skills; it’s a tactical shooter. You have to use tactical positioning and team coordination to have any measure of success. Know your weapons, the map and, most importantly, your team to win.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Xbox Live Gold Account for online play for the Xbox 360
• Headset microphone for online play

Single-Player Basics

1. If this is the first time you’ve ever played a tactical shooter, leave the difficulty setting on Arcade. It doesn’t take much to die in games like this, and Rainbow Six Vegas is no exception, but Arcade mode gives you a good bit more health than most.

2. Right after the first cut scene, when you’re dropped out of the helicopter, there’s no one immediately around you. Take a moment and shoot at the walls and play with the movement. Get used to how recoil affects your shots, and watch the grouping of bullet holes on the walls until you get a feel for how the game works.

3. You’ll quickly notice that you have almost no accuracy when you hold down the trigger. Shoot in bursts only, or go into your weapon options and place the gun into burst or single-shot mode to keep your accuracy. Remember, this a tactical shooter, so the game attempts to be more realistic than most. It doesn’t take more than one good shot to take down an enemy.

4. Use cover while moving and waiting for the shot. Pace yourself. You can’t run in like most games and cover the field with weapons fire; you’ll just get picked off. For most of the game, you’ll need to inch forward, keeping behind cover and using the “pop out” cover system to look around you and get the shot you need.

5. Later in the first level, you’ll get your team with you. Don’t be afraid to use them. As long as they aren’t actually dead, they can be critically wounded and the game won’t be over, whereas if you get critically wounded, it will be. They also aren’t bad shots and aren’t too stupid. Send them ahead of you, around corners and into suspicious alleyways, but make sure they have enough cover to stay alive. If they are wounded for too long, they’ll bleed out, and it’ll be game over anyway when you can’t reach them to lend medical assistance.

Single-Player Advanced

6. Use the snake cam and all the other gadgets to find out where the enemy is before they see you. In room-to-room situations, tell your teammates to take one door, and use the snake cam to look through the other. Have them charge on command and pick the rest off from behind.

7. Don’t be afraid to use your team as bait as well. Equip a sniper rifle or put an assault rifle on single shot with a scope and send your team deep into enemy territory from afar. They should stir up enemy activity, and you can sit back and easily pick them off one by one.

8. You can also bait the enemy out yourself. Place your teammates behind elevated cover and run out and make the enemy chase you back to them. They usually don’t have trouble taking down several tangos before you get back to the cover.

9. When dealing with the multiple hostage situations in the game, post your guys at one entrance and use the snake cam to select the tangos that most threaten the hostages first. You should handle the backup.

Multiplayer Basics

10. The most basic tactic you need to win is communication in team matches. Simply calling out where you got killed and how many enemies you see will vastly improve your odds at coming out on top. Work with your team, coordinate attacks and cover each other. If you’re not talking, you’re not winning.

11. Use the right weapon for the right situation. If the other team has mostly heavy armor, use the more powerful weapons if you don’t have good aim or the more stable weapons if you have good aim for the head shot. On the other hand, if they are fast with light armor, use guns with higher rates of fire because it takes less to take them down. Don’t use long-range weapons like the sniper rifles on closed-in maps, and use longer-range weapons like assault rifles if you have to reach out to touch someone on larger, more open maps.

12. Use cover. In team or free-for-all matches, it’s critical that you never stand out in the open. Always stay behind a wall when waiting for the shot, and move behind objects on the field when going mobile.

13. Know the maps. Find the best sniping points, the best intrusion areas and where to defend your spawn or package areas.

Multiplayer Advanced

14. Utilize the different selector types for each gun. Most guns let you go into single-shot mode, and some allow two or three shot bursts. The accuracy characteristics of the guns change dramatically when in these modes, and while much less powerful than the sniper rifles, you can snipe effectively with most assault rifles and even some submachine guns with the rifle scope on. You can still fire rapidly for follow-up shots as well, just by tapping the trigger button down fast in these modes.

15. If your team isn’t communicating well, and you can’t get them to listen, use them as the bait. Most online players that come from “twitch”-style shooters will run up the middle, and the other team will be focused on intercepting them. Sneak around the back and take out as many of the other team while they are distracted. You may not be able to win the game this way, but you can at least come out with a good kill/death ratio.

Tips & Warnings

• While propped up against a wall in third person, hold down the button that opens up the goggle selection menu. While on, you should notice that the item selection menu makes a circle in the center. You can use this to aim while totally covered by the wall. Just hold down the button and aim where desired, and then pop out quickly to take the shot without having to totally expose yourself during the aiming process.
• The laser sight increases the accuracy of various guns in strange ways. Sometimes, such as with most assault rifles, it decreases recoil a bit, and with shotguns it narrows the pellet spread for longer-range shooting. If you don’t like narrowing your field of view by zooming in, use the laser sight and see if it improves your accuracy.
• The weapons have more characteristics than the in-game stats let on. The FAMAS, P90 and MAC11 have high rates of fire for their low damage. Some guns are more stable than the accuracy rating states, like the M8 assault rifle. Play with the guns a bit to find out which you like to use.
• Remember, you’re dealing with human beings on the other end of the mic. You may be stuck with people who don’t take direction very well, can’t work together with a team and maybe are ill-tempered and utterly foul-mouthed. Just like dealing with people in real life, it usually pays off to be courteous rather than callous if you’re not doing very well.
• People don’t always play fair. Some use glitches in the map to gain an advantage with invisible walls and other nasty, underhanded tricks. Try to get the server host to kick out problem players, or use your in-game reporting service to get rid of cheaters.
• Be aware of server lag and other Internet-connection-related issues with playing. Your bullets may land in someone’s head on your side and seem to not do anything, while your opponent was already clear behind cover on his end. Make sure everyone has strong signal strength before launching a match if you’re the server host.

Resources

• Rainbow Six Vegas