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Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Shadow Vanguard

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Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Shadow Vanguard

With Rainbow Six: Shadow Vanguard, it looks like Gameloft is trying to continue its long march across the first-person shooter wastes, after the relative success of the N.O.V.A. and Modern Combat franchises.

It's a barren genre on mobile, and with good reason: first-person controls are notoriously difficult for developers to pull off on smartphone.

The Xperia Play’s specialised controls have a good crack at addressing this problem. Whether it does enough is a matter of how much patience you have for the inevitable niggles of movement.

Go! Go! Go!

There’s a fairly functional shooter present in this iteration of Tom Clancy’s series, with all the usual ingredients.

As Rainbow’s Alpha Team, you and your two squadmates are thrown into the standard terrorist situation, saving hostages and disarming explosives in any number of action movie locales, from rainforests to oil rigs.

Much of it is focused on team tactics, with contextual icons appearing on your screen allowing your squad to take cover, plant C4, and clear rooms of enemy troops.

These features make good use of the touchscreen and the Play’s controls do enhance the gunplay. The L and R buttons are mapped to the sights and trigger respectively, which does make open combat more intuitive.

Sadly, the overenthusiastic auto-assist often makes it difficult to get in those satisfying headshots when behind cover.

Breaching!

The enemy (and team mate) AI is fairly disappointing as well. A few times during our playthrough our squadmates (Kim and Akindele, if you really want to know) were calmly standing right next to enemies, not firing a single bullet. Silly Kim and Akindele.

That’s not to say the teamwork and contextual actions always fail to hit the target. Arranging your squad at a door and prepping a breach and clear with a flashbang is one of the more satisfying manoeuvres you can pull off, albeit a bit of a repetitive one.

Clear!

In typical FPS fashion, you earn experience points as you progress. Each headshot or piece of synchronised shooting gets you points throughout each level.

With these you gain equipment and gun attachments such as laser sights, extended magazines, and new grenade types. Although it’s hard to notice any major improvement, as the only tactically significant piece of equipment is the silencer, which you get in every loadout from the very first mission.

It’s a decent shooter, with a strong focus on slow movement, cover and tactics as opposed to balls-out action. However, those control niggles still remain.

Movement isn’t so much a problem, but the lack of intuitive and speedy aiming sometimes is. With this in mind, Gameloft’s earlier offerings are still likely to be the favoured among gun nuts.

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Shadow Vanguard

Functional and occasionally satisfying, Rainbow Six: Shadow Vanguard isn’t as good as it’s Gameloftian cousins but it may still appeal to meticulous special forces fans
Score
Brendan Caldwell
Brendan Caldwell
Brendan is a boy. Specifically, a boy who plays games. More specifically, a nice boy who plays many games. He often feels he should be doing something else. That's when the siren call of an indie gem haunts him. Who shall win this battle of wills? Answer: not Brendan.