18 Apr 2008 10:31
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2 – the sequel to the award-winning next-generation first-person shooter – returns to Sin City. Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2 is your last chance to rescue America's sexiest city from an escalating terrorist siege that will force you into heart-pounding action from beginning to end. The best are back and this time winner takes all.
Though there are differences between the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of Rainbow Six Vegas 2 that make the 360 version slimly preferable, both unequivocally capture the same excellent experience. The lack of rumble in the PS3 controller is still a drag. Also, it takes a little longer to find a good PS3 online game for three reasons: fewer people are playing, you can only see a match's latency once you've joined, and you will randomly be unable to connect to certain servers. But the graphics are comparable and the gameplay is identical, so overall, the PS3 version is easy to recommend.
And that makes it better than most games because Rainbow Six Vegas 2 is the best tactical shooter on the market. It doesn't gamble as much as it should and, instead, seems to take cover behind the formidable foundation established in the first game. But to its credit, Rainbow Six Vegas 2 does make one big gameplay tweak and provides another highly playable single-player campaign. It also provides a decent suite of cooperative options and more excellent online multiplayer. Though its experience system is now clearly behind the one found in Call of Duty 4, no game has a better control scheme or more satisfying tactical play. This ace belongs in every shooter's hand.
Aesthetically Vegas 2 is similar to its gameplay in that not a whole lot has changed. Unreal Engine 3 still shines through in the detailed character models but the environments are less flashy overall, mainly because you spend the majority of your time away from the bright lights of Las Vegas. There also seem to be more instances of the framerate slowing down, sometimes to a crawl. A symptom that is exacerbated on the PS3 where textures and effects are already not up to the 360's standard. One feather that can be placed in the hat of Vegas 2 is that the environments are more interactive than they were before. Glass can be blown out of entire floors of buildings and certain environment set pieces can be impressively blown to bits.
As I said previously, the biggest problem that most will have with Vegas 2 is that it doesn’t differentiate itself enough from the first. It doesn’t feel like an expansion pack exactly–-it’s more than that--but it doesn’t feel like a full-fledged sequel either. For those who haven’t taken a stroll down the streets of Sin City than you needn’t look any further than Rainbow Six Vegas 2, but those looking for a sequel that surpasses the original in everyway imaginable will be disappointed.
The pacing of the multiplayer action in Rainbow Six Vegas 2 is far slower than a Call of Duty or Halo 3, of course. If you haven’t played the tactical style of the RS3 series for a bit, you’ll be thinking “molasses” the entire time, but it’s just the nature of this beast. This isn’t a dig on the performance of Rainbow Six Vegas 2 online (it runs quite beautifully, in fact), but know upfront that running and gunning is about as effective here as it is in Gears of War. We can dig on the visuals a bit, though. The lack of visual refinement in the series since 2006 is fairly apparent when running Rainbow Six Vegas 2 through its online paces. Everything is in place to make Rainbow Six Vegas 2 work from a technical standpoint, but there is little “pop” to the entire production. Maybe we’re just spoiled with how Call of Duty 4 looked. Then again, RS3 has never been known as a visual “stunna,” but this follow-up really shows that the aesthetics need to be addressed wherever Rainbow lands next time.
Ubisoft swears that the Rainbow Six 3 franchise will not return to Vegas, despite the clever ways in which the story could be brought back there with what we’ve been left with. If this is in fact true, we’ve enjoyed our time there, especially during our first visit in 2006. Rainbow Six Vegas 2 is a competent shooter as well—just like its high-stakes predecessor—but we have a sneaking suspicion that Ubi sunk more development dollars into the next next installment of Rainbow Six than it did into this title. Rainbow Six Vegas 2 is definitely worth a look-see, but don’t expect much more excitement than the first time you plopped Lockdown into that fat, black console.
As much fun as the single player game can be, the saving grace is the multiplayer. For a start the points and experience you gain in the single player mode can be taken into the online world, making it feel less like a separate game bolted on at the end of the development lifecycle. There are a lot of different modes to play out in multiplayer, not least of which is the entire single player campaign done as co-op. The levels have been built to make the most of this so you never feel crowded and can work together properly to make your way through the familiar locations.
It’s easy from the first impressions to think that this is just a quick and cheap cop out expansion pack disguised as a full game. If it wasn’t for the fact that this is still so much damn fun to play it would probably take a bullet to the head and be left to rot. But we just can’t do that. The great multiplayer and co-op are worthy of the price alone, and as familiar as it feels, the single player game is still a tremendous experience, albeit a little short. It’s not a generation jump from the original, but then again it didn’t have to be. Some people may complain that graphically it offers little new, but it still plays like a gem and offers a lot of entertainment for the price – and for us th
81%
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