If there’s one thing that the Play team loves, it’s six-month late ports of Xbox 360 games that are inferior to the originals. We love slightly worse frame rates and forced Sixaxis controls. We love receiving a couple of new multiplayer maps and game modes as compensation for our £425 investment. Oh, and if you hadn’t guessed, the other thing the Play team really loves is sarcasm.

If you’re in the business of guessing, then first of all – how did you get paid for guessing? That’s an awesome job. Secondly though, if you’re any good at this so-called job, you’ll have guessed that Rainbow Six Vegas is not quite the stellar conversion that we were expecting. Much like Splinter Cell: Double Agent before it, Ubisoft has done a great job in showing that our beloved PS3s may just be a complete bastard to program for. Perhaps the age of easy crossplatform porting may be over.

So, it’s an unmitigated disaster right? No? How did you know?… oh you are good at that guessing job. Okay, we take it all back. You go earn your money, tiger. Yes, as you so cleverly guessed (such a talent), despite a smattering of irritations and unnecessary niggles, Rainbow Six Vegas is still the absolute cream of the tactical shooter crop. And if you’ve never been exposed to the 360 version, then let us take you on a little trip to the Nevada desert.

Rainbow Six Vegas, for the uninitiated, is a very serious (Clancy serious, oh yes) tactical shooter with the focus placed firmly on realism. Taking control of a three-man squad, it’s up to you to rescue Las Vegas from a group of militant terrorists, save the entire Western World, get wrapped up in a modicum of political wrangling and generally act like a gruff action hero for a good 15 hours. Beginning in an uncomfortably racist representation of Mexico City, complete with La Cucaracha playing over a distant PA system, you and your team pop terrorists in their heads with hi-tech weaponry while learning how to be as good a cop as you can be.

And to be a good cop, you need to know how to take control of your squad. Most of Rainbow Six Vegas sees you in direct command of two team-mates, whom you direct to anywhere on the map with a simple jab of X. The way they move is a joy to behold, animated with the poise and fluidity we’ve come to expect from Clancy games, but displaying a genuine sense of awareness to their surroundings and, more importantly, to the nearest piece of cover. So, a typical situation you find yourself in early on in the game: a group of terrorists are occupying the back end of an alleyway, hidden behind cover, while you approach from the front. A poor tactician would run in, guns blazing, maybe get off a few kills before losing either one of his men or his own life. A clever tactician, however, would order his team to stay in cover and lay down suppressing fire, while scoping out an opportunity to flank. Lo and behold, there’s an adjoining alleyway, and the clever tactician in you knows to scoot down there and blindside your foes while your boys keep them distracted.

Rainbow Six Vegas is littered with opportunities like this, thanks in no small part to its ingenious level design. There’s never just one way to approach a given situation or encounter; often the game provides three or even four ways to tackle a set-piece. Do you order your boys to smash through the far window as you line up Tangos in your sniper scope? Or do you hurl in a flash grenade and watch as your blinded enemies are brutalised by your elite team-mates? Or just all pile in there guns blazing? It’s up to you. You’re free to try out tactics to your heart’s content, and the only way Vegas will punish you is with an armour-piercing bullet through your brain cavity. Not in real life. That would be illegal, and dangerous.

No, as those fat-cat guessing moguls have probably already figured out, Rainbow Six Vegas is one hard videogame. As you’re a man and not a genetically enhanced superfreak, bullets tend to hurt. If you get shot, you’re probably going to die, unless you hide for a bit, of course. Surely there’s a better way of getting rid of health bars than this? Still, you won’t be complaining when you narrowly avoid death five seconds away from the next checkpoint, because those bad boys are spaced far too far apart. Like Turok 2 on the N64, far apart. And replaying the same section of any game over and over again is never fun. So don’t get killed. It’s a simple mantra, and one you should adhere to. Like don’t buy Turok 2. Or Turok anything. Simple.

And how do you keep from getting killed? By staying the hell in cover. If you’re used to charging headlong into hail fire in your shooters, then prepare to have quite a miserable time in Las Vegas. You’re going to be cashing your chips pretty early. So, find a good-looking wall or box or car or tree and get behind it. Tugging L1 sticks you to the nearest cover and snaps your view into third-person mode, allowing you to peek out and look for trouble, lean your gun around for blindfire, issue orders from safety and, of course, the ever popular pop and shoot. Can’t beat the old pop and shoot. Oh no. So well implemented is the cover system in Rainbow Six Vegas that many a 360 player maintains its superiority to Gears Of War’s, so it must be doing something right. And it is – it just removes the fussiness of coverhugging, making it nearly as simple as it is in real life. Compare that to the degree you need to figure out Metal Gear Solid’s pop and shoot and you’ll become very thankful for the ingenuity on display at Ubisoft. Especially with those god-damned checkpoints.

So, you’ve mastered the art of cover and you’ve got your team-mates strutting around Vegas with the confidence of strutting team-mates, so surely this whole counterterrorism thing is jut going to work itself out? Wrong, guessing-boy! You’re fired! And why? Because you forgot the most vital ingredient in the Rainbow Six recipe… doors! Essentially, even Vegas’s greatest casinos boil down to a series of interconnecting rooms with multiple routes of entry, meaning you and your team can do what they do best, and that’s get their door on.

A quick piece of door-action for you: first slide the handy Clancy favourite – the Snake cam – under the door. Notice the rubbish Sixaxis tilt controls which make it slightly more cumbersome than it ever needs to be. Place a target over an enemy’s head, so your chaps know who to hit first, then back off and let them “stack up”. This means “stand by door” in the language of cool. From there, you’ll have all manner of grenade and covert-based options for entry, so choose one and watch as your team pours into the room and sorts everything out. Or if you chose a stupid option, watch them die. You can even go to a different door and enter a room simultaneously. You just can’t beat those doors.

It’s a shame then that despite being a brilliant, deep and satisfying game in its own right, the PS3 version of Rainbow Six Vegas just isn’t as good as the 360’s. Why does the camera jerk when you scale a kerb? Why do certain enemies die in brokenrag- doll animations, bending themselves into ridiculous contortions for no apparent reason? Why is the frame rate ever so slightly choppier? None of it is remotely gamebreaking, but it still isn’t good enough. We’re supposed to be playing on a superior console, so to not get ports that are on a par with the competition feels like a slap in the face.

Still, there’s too much to like in Rainbow Six Vegas to truly let it spoil the experience. If the PS3 community takes to the multiplayer as the 360 online crew has, then there’ll be months of incredibly tense and taut deathmatching to be had – and with the PS3-exclusive maps, huge scope for replayability. Yes, the graphics have taken a hit for multiplayer (as they did on 360), but it matters little when you sneak up behind that revolting American teenager and part his life from his body. Who needs HDR lighting for that?

Even without multiplayer, Rainbow Six Vegas is the type of triple-A experience that few should be without. While those with a penchant for arcade thrills may baulk at the uncompromising realism, everyone else will be more than satisfied with a videogame that excels in almost every area. Playability, atmosphere, visuals, sheer head-splitting tension… it’s all here in spades. And in a period of drought (save for the excellent The Darkness), it’s exactly the type of game the PS3 needs. Hopefully the GRAW 2 conversion will not suffer the same afflictions that have hurt the last two PS3 Clancy conversions, but until then there’s no better tactical shooter on the machine, and no more thrilling way to live out your counter-terrorism fantasies. But you’d already guessed that, hadn’t you? You talented, rich bastards.

Jon Denton