It’s  been nearly four years since we’ve seen anything even remotely related to Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six, the tactical first-person shooter from Ubisoft. The last entry in the series, Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 was released in early 2008, and became an online favourite for tactical-minded gamers. The next game, it seems, will dispense with the overused Vegas setting, and move to the even more overused city of New York.

Yet to be officially announced, the game’s been outed by two Ubisoft domain name registrations, discovered by Fusible : Rainbow6Patriots.com and RainbowsixPatriots.com. That’s solid, concrete stuff, right? According to a neoGaffer, “the next Rainbow Six will be announced in Xbox World Magazine in the upcoming month.” He claims to be in  possession of “assets, logos, arts, the covers and rendered game screens,” from a “buddy that I know in marketing.” Yup, totally legit.

“I will not [be showing] anything for the moment as I will let the mag do his work, but what I can tell is that the logo is 6 with the pistol that replace the bottom circle,” says BLITZ, the guy holding on the contraband marketing material – revealing just that “The arts backgrounds are with the New York in fire and the renders characters are very similar to Homefront, yet the clothes are still based with police Rainbow Six gears. What I understood, the plot will go between a large group of revolutionary terrorists and of course the police. “

I hope the game is coming; I had a lot of fun playing Vegas co-op with my mates online – but I really think we’ve seen enough of New York in ruins; something that we’ve seen recently in Prototype, Crysis 2, and next month’s sure-fire sales hit, Modern Warfare 3.