- Title: Rainbow Six Vegas 2
- Platform: Xbox 360
- Publisher: Ubisoft
- Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
- ESRB Rating: “M” for Mature
- Genre: FPS
- Pros: Great co-op; new XP system; excellent controls; lots to do
- Cons: Not a big leap over the first Vegas
- Achievements: Good balance between SP and MP.
Features
The story in Vegas 2 takes place before, during, and after the events of the first game to give you a bit of a different perspective on the story before it ties up the loose ends left from the first game’s cliffhanger ending.
A nice change in Vegas 2 is that rather than playing as a rough and tough established characters, you have the opportunity to truly make the character and the whole game your own. Thanks to the new single-player XP system, you are rewarded for playing the way you like to play and by the end you have a set of custom weapons and armor that is truly you. By scoring head shots, or blind fire kills, or grenade kills, or even if your A.I. teammates kill an enemy you earn experience in different categories and when you level up you get new gear. It is a very cool system that constantly rewards you for playing and is a fun little touch that makes SP and co-op a lot more fun.
Speaking of co-op, it is amazing in Vegas 2. It has been trimmed down to two players for the campaign but you can still have four in Terrorist Hunt. A nice change is that you now have A.I. teammates in co-op, and using them wisely really opens up new strategies for the human players.
Gameplay
Vegas 2 changes up the gameplay a bit as well. The biggest change is that you now have a sprint button so that running to cover is a bit easier. This has a pretty big impact because it speeds up the game a bit since you can move forward and dive behind cover a lot more effectively. It is still tactical, slowly paced, realistic Rainbow Six at its core, though, so don’t think you can just run around levels like a madman. The core of the game is pretty much the same as before, which is a good thing since Vegas featured some of the most solid, intuitive, and just plain good FPS gameplay on the Xbox 360. Everything feels right in these games. One thing we noticed, however, is that it seems that the A.I. has been dumbed down a bit. Your teammate A.I. has a bad habit of standing out in the open unless you constantly babysit them with new commands, and they also get stuck on objects from time to time. The enemy A.I. is also a bit too willing to just rush your position, which makes for easy kills. All in all, though, there is no question that Vegas 2 is as solid and fun and satisfying of a game as you’ll find.
Graphics and Sound
Graphically, not much has changed in Vegas 2. It is a little sharper, maybe, and more detailed if you look close, but if you put up screens of the two games next to each other it would be hard to pick which was which. One nice touch is that the environments are more destructible than before, and blowing certain objects to bits is just plain fun. One negative of the new game is that it doesn’t seem to run quite as well as the first one. The framerate dips in situations where it didn’t in the first, which while not so bad it is game breaking, is kind of disappointing.The sound is also good, but mostly unchanged. You’ll hear familiar music and the same sound effects, but they were good to begin with so no real complaints here. The voice acting is a bit better and more believable, but not stellar.
Bottom Line
