“We’ve got Tangos” – Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Lockdown

**Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Lockdown** (Ubisoft, Xbox, 2005)

My third Ubisoft game has several things in common with the first two, some differences, and a lot that points towards both the future and how Ubisoft ended up doing so well in that future. Following two Splinter Cell games it is, first of all, another Tom Clancy game, an effective bit of branding that lets you know what you’re in for tone and story wise.

In this case it’s a story about an international military force defending freedom from terrorists. Said terrorists are introduced with an explanation about blaming developed nations for the “Third World”’s problems and wanting them to relieve their debts, or else they will kill random civilians. It’s written in such a way as to indicate the part of the paragraph before the “or else” is jokingly-but-actually wrong too, casting those views as both laughable and sinister.

Considering that 2005 was the year of the Make Poverty History campaign calling for exactly that debt relief, there’s a pretty obvious through-line from there to Ubisoft’s 2020 decision to make a Tom Clancy game with a barely-veiled Black Lives Matter movement as the enemy. They went beyond the typical demonising of other countries to demonise any movements of opposition to the status quo, with the rightness of maintaining it by force assumed and reiterated. It’s a game for a world where fairground stalls give kids anti-terrorist police kits with guns and knives as prizes, and yes this really did happen to my three-year-old a few weeks back.

It’s not just imperialist politics that Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Lockdown, the fourth Rainbow Six game, shares with Splinter Cell. You can look at the world through the same night vision and thermal vision filters, and the way you make your way through a series of corridors and rooms with stationary enemies waiting for you to arrive there and kill them is broadly similar. The filters are more of a cool gimmick than an essential part of gameplay in this case, as became obvious when I tried to do a bit of Splinter Cell-style shooting out of lights and found the lights impervious to bullets. Instead, it’s directing a squad of three others which is where the depth lies instead.

There is something in how Lockdown eases you into this which makes it a much closer fit to Splinter Cell (and to Ubisoft’s other later well-worn formulas) than to SOCOM: US Navy Seals or even Conflict: Desert Storm. Those gave you a fair degree of freedom and a lot going on which meant, in SOCOM’s case, a bewildering world where without careful planning death came suddenly and you didn’t even know where from. Lockdown shares its language of enemy ‘tangos’, but lines them up as a series of well-defined encounters. You know when you’ve been tangoed.

Lockdown comes with some smartly set up ways to use the squad, like getting them to knock doors down, throw a grenade in and go in to clear out, which you can set up and then trigger at the appropriate moment with a further button press. Superficially, you have a range of tactical options, and you do have finer control over your squad than in a token effort like Medal of Honor: European Assault.

It all but tells you when to use your squad for a dual assault each time, though, at first literally and later because you can use a heartbeat monitor to show where people are present in rooms you can’t see into. In reality, it’s a straightforward first-person shooter with a layer of complication that mostly serves to make you feel clever, while rarely requiring you to be clever. And, well, as someone who found SOCOM too much, there is no doubt that I did find progressing through Rainbow Six: Lockdown a more enjoyable experience on a couple of levels. But the pandering illusion of complexity, in both gameplay and narrative, makes for a dangerous combination.