Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2

"Vegas review for newspaper"

Welcome to Vegas, however in this alternate reality what happens here most definitely does not stay here. Here in Tom Clancy's vision, a group of highly trained mercenaries want to make sure Sin City is no longer standing. Logan, Bishop and a group of highly trained “Rainbow Six” members must infiltrate the city and take them out before they take Vegas out.


This sequel in the series is more or less a parallel and continuation of the story, and that's great as it answers a lot of the questions left in the cliffhanger during the first game. The story however is fairly standard for a first person shooter, particularly those from Tom Clancy's world, there won't be a lot of emotion or a lot of development so don't go in expecting emotional ties to your characters, despite some of the feelings developed in the first game. That and the voices for the side-characters are low during gameplay making most of the development inaudible.

The gameplay is exactly the same as it was in Vegas 1, wall hugging, corner shooting and aiming down the irons and all. The only real difference is that they have added sprinting, although in as slow a game as this that doesn't matter very much since it is such a slow paced game. Think Gears of War if it was much more realistic, and the enemies didn't take fifty rounds to take out a piece. However, there is one major problem with the game; Terrorist Hunt. They haven't removed the spawn points, and their supposed fix to this was that they were just going to spawn behind you instead of in front of you. It is not fun to be going around a hall you just cleared only to be met by a terrorist with a Spas aimed at your face. On the bright side though, this does make for some fun situations when playing with friends, particularly walking into an empty room and suddenly eight terrorists spawning on top of the player's head insta-gibbing him. The game mode is still fun, just not as fun as it could have been.

The graphics aren't the cream of the crop. Think Vegas 1 without that annoying shade of brown. And a lot of the technical problems that plagued the first have been fixed, the main problem now just being the computer specifications required to play it, but seeing as most pc gamers who are serious by now have shader model 3.0, running it shouldn't be a problem.


The online community, so far, is looking fairly small still. Getting online at a prime time, will net you with matchmaking only about four to five servers nearly full, but matchmaking makes it truly hard to gauge how large the community is. However, it appears about the same size as the first Vegas had on pc when it just came out, and that community is still playing and enjoying that game despite the lack of patches from Ubisoft. The game will survive, especially if Ubisoft does their job and fix up the couple of big bugs and glitches in the game, as they did with their release day patch, and there is definitely still room for more.

The customization in this game feels like it was first priority. Imagine playing a G.I. dress-up game with gameplay tacked on. However, since this has good gameplay that is completely fine. There are choices for what type of armor to wear, what type of clothes to wear on that armor, glasses and masks to put on, and of course customizable guns each allowing for their own patterns, and on the pc the ability to add your own patterns. They even decided it would be a nice idea, and it was, to add the ability to scan faces into the game and then play with that face, and oh how much fun that is.

Verdict:

With an excellent feel to the gameplay, a story that will keep you going, and online capabilities that allow for unique characters, and then killing other unique characters, what's not to like? The game is a lot more stable this time around on the pc, and actually it looks like Ubisoft used that extra month it took to come out to fix some problems that the Xbox and PS3 are still waiting to be fixed. Overall, if you enjoy First person shooters, and have a pc up to new gaming standards, and you don't mind some technical issues. it should be a definite buy.

Positives:
Graphics improved
Heavily optimized
Very intuitive combat

Neutral Ground:
Still a bit glitchy
Weaponry still might feel a bit odd, for people coming from other FPS games

Negatives:
Seems like more of a refresh, than a new game
Needs a bit more optimization than it has.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 04/24/08

Game Release: Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2 (US, 04/15/08)