These are high expectations too. Before I began playing Rainbow Six: Vegas, I convinced myself that I should compare it to Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter both visually and gameplay-wise. I hadn't beaten GRAW on the hardest difficulty, so I figured I'd play a few levels to remind myself how the game played. I was instantly hooked on Ghost Recon and had to literally force myself to stop playing it so I could focus my energy on Rainbow Six.

It also turns out that Rainbow Six: Vegas and Gears of War use the same version of the Unreal engine for the Xbox 360. That meant that I needed to play Gears side by side with Rainbow Six to compare those two games. The very fact that after playing two such incredible games on the 360, I was still completely impressed with Rainbow Six: Vegas should give you an impression of the caliber of game that it is.

Graphically the game's environments are stellar. They are all incredibly detailed with high-resolution textures and tons of debris lying around to give the game that additional realism. The game is set predominantly in Las Vegas, with a delightfully accurate representation of the city of sin. The details cover the gamut from representations of the major hotels and casinos (mostly when flying around in the helicopter) down to individual pamphlets for Vegas shows littered on the ground. The scenes are all set up with a close attention to detail to really make you feel like you're in the game.

There were times when I interacted with other characters (hostages mostly) where I felt like the faces lacked the same level of detail that they put into the environment. The textures were very artfully designed so as to make them look realistic from certain angles but from other angles you could tell that the faces lacked consistent detail. That seemed to be the only area where the game wasn't simply amazing looking and it occurred so rarely that it wasn't a major issue from my perspective.

The gameplay this time around goes leaps and bound beyond what was available in previous Rainbow Six titles. Probably the most obvious difference is the incorporation of the vertical dimension to the gameplay. In previous games, you had stairways and such, but I never felt like I had complete freedom to interact with all three dimensions. In Vegas, it's a common occurrence to fast rope out of a helicopter onto the roof, repel down the side of a skyscraper with your squad mates and simultaneously kick through the windows to eliminate the hostage threat. It's a scene I've seen often in SWAT movies and a complete thrill in the game.

There are other improvements to the game such as the ability to peek under a door with a fiber optic camera and designate the priority of the targets. This is critical when you have a terrorist that's holding a hostage at gunpoint and you need to take him out first.

The game is completely and realistically tactical. The hostiles are really intelligent and if you don't move aggressively will flank you. You'll need to employ flanking tactics of your own by having your team hold position while you flank the enemy. Your buddies (you can do this too) will blind fire in order to suppress the terrorists and keep them pinned down. You move around and flank them eliminating their cover, then gun them down and call your team forward.

All this and the classic room clearing tactics are still there. You can still stack up at the doorway and select from several room clearing techniques depending on what fits the situation. You can blow the door open with C4 explosives if there is a tango on the other side of it or if you need to eliminate their ability to react to the door opening. You can throw a flash grenade that blinds and stuns anyone in the room if there are noncombatants present near the door. There are fragmentation grenades and smoke grenades too. You can rush into the room without any frills, and you can even enter by a different aperture than your teammates. The point is that the sky is the limit when it comes to how you want to handle the tactical situation. Some approaches will definitely work better than others but it's your choice.

The online game play was just as good except instead of only two other people to coordinate, you can have several. There are many ways to conduct your tactics. Whether you are attacking or defending, you have to choose a strategy and execute it. You adapt to your enemy and he adapts to you.

One feature of the online mode got me so excited I ran out and bought the Xbox Live Vision camera. The game lets you connect the camera to the Xbox, take a picture of your face and your profile and texture-maps your image onto the resulting geometry. The result is a very close facsimile with the exception that it doesn't do your hair. I can understand why, but they don't have the ability to modify your hair or add facial accessories to a custom-built head. I wear glasses, and I don't have a buzz cut so I had to use my imagination a little bit. Regardless, the feature is awesome.

The customization doesn't stop there though. As you gain rank in the online (by winning or losing) you gain access to more accessories, weapons and armor for your online persona. You might think that it's not a big deal, except that the weapons and armor you unlock actually have different characteristics like being heavier while providing maximum protection in the case of armor. The designers claim that while the weapons are all different they are all balanced as well. I've not seen a case where someone won completely because they had upgraded weapons and armor, so I'm inclined to agree.

There was at one point an issue with the communications being distance based which is supremely dumb, but they have fortunately fixed it since with an Xbox Live patch.

Finally, I'm a big fan of a good story in a game. I especially like the special ops breed of story that Tom Clancy puts out. I've actually started reading his novels recently. It's a backwards way to go about it, moving from games to books, but I'm usually skeptical about changing genres and authors at the same time. Turns out Tom's a great author and regardless of whether or not he had anything to do with the writing of this game it definitely captures his style of story telling. I thoroughly enjoyed the story. It wasn't exceptionally deep or twisted, but I can't help but enjoy stories about dark, ominous forces that will stop at nothing to bring down the United States. It's very real and chilling at the same time.

The story is on the short side, for reasons that I'll leave to you to determine for lack of spoilage, but worth playing through. If for no other reason than it prepares you for the online game.

The bottom line is that this is an incredible game online or offline. My high expectations, and they were indeed high, were met and exceeded in what I can only term one of my most favorite Xbox games yet.