I've never been a huge fan of the Rainbow Six games, even though I buy every single one. The fact is, any game which attempts to emulate modern special forces combat, I will probably buy. Despite being significantly changed from previous Rainbow Six titles, Lockdown manages to provide roughly the same failed experience.
One of the defining features of the previous Rainbow Six titles was the mission planning system, which allowed you to script the movements of multiple squads. You could also jump into any soldier, and control him as well. In practice, this system sucked. One could either let the game design the mission plan for you, then you would generally follow their plan, and hope none of the computer controlled friendlies would get themselves killed, or you could try to solo the mission, or at least, hide your squads out of sight, then take control of them as needed, and use one while the others hid.
So, when I hear that Lockdown did away with the mission planning altogether, I looked forward to checking it out, and was disappointed to find it's mostly the same thing as the previous games. The reason for this is simple: Idiot AI.
At this point in computer game evolution, “babysit the AI” is not an acceptable game concept. Games like Brothers in Arms are out there, with squadmates who more or less do what you'd hope they'd do, and the contrast is striking. In Lockdown, your squad is basically retarded. They shoot pretty accurately, and can take a few hits themselves, but they're really a major liability in combat. They are always taking up position on corners they shouldn't, facing the wrong way, walking through your line of fire, failing to watch where you wanted them to watch, and generall fucking everything up.
There's a limited set of commands one can use to move them around. You can send them to a spot, and they will generally go there, give or take 15 feet. You can tell them to hold or to follow. They do this fairly well, although I found that they'd periodically just start following me for no reason I could discern. I might have been accidentally hitting the follow button, but I don't think so. They seem to just decide they're not holding anymore, and come running, generally into enemy fire.
There's door breaching and clearing commands, which are sorta neat, and can work well, but the AI soldiers will sometimes fail to throw their grenade into the room correctly. Sometimes they don't throw anything (despite saying “grenade out”), and sometimes they manage to hit a squadmate, landing the grenade at their own feet, blowing the squad away.
The enemy AI is not much better. It basically consists of sitting in a spot, peeking, and maybe running around randomly. As a result, the game basically degenerates into making your team wait a safe distance back, then slowly “slicing the pie” around a corner, picking off the idiot terrorists as they lean in and out of cover. They don't always (or even usually) respond to gunshots, even right next to them.
There's no discernable plot.
I experienced a number of AI glitches in game (one of my squadmembers would sometimes just stand somewhere and refuse to move). The game also crashed on me fairly frequently, perhaps once per hour of gameplay.
Sounds seemed wrong at times. Brass ejecting from guns would make odd clacking echos at times. Enemies that were distant would seem to be yelling directly next to me. An odd stuttering sound sometimes occurred.
There are some nice aspects, though. There's a lot of good to be said about the weapons, for example. There's a large variety, and their in game models are some of the best I've seen. While their feel is as tinny and weak as all the previous Rainbow Six games, but they do have noticeably different characteristics, which generally represent the tradeoffs in accuracy, maneuverability, and wounding capacity that real weapons deal with.
The graphics are also pretty solid. Textures and friendly models looked good, and in game mirrors were interesting to see. Nightvision mode works well, and allows the player to see flashing IR tags on the shoulders of friendlies, to aid in target recognition. Smoke effects are decent, and there's some interesting effects on the goggles of the first person view in rain, and cold areas.
All in all, this game is just not up to par, given the competition, and it's not sufficiently clean, given how well most games run these days. There was a time when a crash here and there, some odd sound issues, and wonky AI, were what one got in a PC game. Those days are past, however, and the Rainbow Six series needs to catch back up.