iPhone News Updated

Rainbow Six: Shadow Vanguard iPhone Review

Rainbow Six: Shadow Vanguard iPhone Review

Let’s start this out with a personal anecdote. When playing Gameloft’s Modern Combat 2, I couldn’t wait to see what was around the next corner right up through the final mission. In Rainbow Six: Shadow Vanguard, I lost interest at the halfway mark. It doesn’t help that the collage of missions lacks a centralized narrative.

What really got to me was that the contextual controls I hoped would solve the cluttered screen problem of many iPhone action games – specifically Gameloft’s. Namely, they didn’t help much after all. My thumbs were still all over the screen, stabbing at a dozen different buttons.

Shadow Vanguard is a Rainbow Six game, meaning the focus is on tactical action rather than run-and-gun fireworks. As a fan of the latter Rainbow Six games, such as Vegas, I like the pacing employed here. While some situations do devolve into shooting galleries, Shadow Vanguard places a premium on room sweeping and stealthy advances. You walk up to a door, put your two teammates in position, and then use a snake cam to identify any potential threats on the other side. If the coast isn’t clear, you then mark your targets and choose a course of action, such as a surprise attack under cover of a flashbang.

You direct your teammates by tapping contextual buttons on the environment, such as green markers next to doors or corners. When you sidle up to the door, buttons for opening the door, using a grenade, storming with force, and more appear in front of you. This system works well. But there is still so much clutter on-screen, with buttons for weapons select, virtual sticks, aiming, firing, grenades, going into cover, coming out of cover, monitoring noise level, pausing, and more. It’s too much, especially when you get into an intense firefight. Gyro aim on an iPhone 4 alleviates a little of the busyness (and works well for nailing headshots), but at some point I just wanted to engage the enemy without over-thinking the controls.

In the face

The missions themselves are modestly varied, although most everything boils down to taking out a chief target. Every mission features multiple objectives, including several that result in bonus points. Banking experience from meeting objectives, scoring headshots (which isn’t terribly difficult, considering how un-smart enemies are), and setting up clean operations goes to improving weapons and gear.

Shadow Vanguard includes a healthy multiplayer mode. There are five dedicated deathmatch maps for ten-player team mayhem. Sadly, that mayhem is hampered by weird respawns that have no problem dumping you off right in the middle of enemy territory. Online matches suffer from lag, too. Compared to N.O.V.A. 2, Shadow Vanguard definitely chugs quite a bit more.

The other half of multiplayer is online co-op. Up to three players can dive into the single-player missions and work together to save the day. Immediately, serious problems arise. One, there is no chat – voice or text. So there is no strategizing whatsoever, which pretty much drains the point out of co-op play. Two, if one of your teammates leaves, the game ends. AI does not take over. This is another bummer.

[Thanks: http://wireless.ign.com]

Comments are closed.