Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2 has now hit stores around the country, but with so many other shooters currently gracing our consoles is this one worth putting to the top of the pile or forgetting about it all together?
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2 is a tactical first person shooter. Rather than running through corridors taking out people like in Doom you are required to plan and think through your actions with commands to your teammates. I normally stay away from these titles, mainly due to the over complicated control systems, last time I attempted one of these types of games was on the Dreamcast, and I found that the swapping between actions and commanding your team to be laborious and zapped the fun right out of the game. Thankfully, due to the power of the Xbox 360 and some good game design, Vegas 2 solves these problems and makes for a great gaming experience.
The game takes us to Vegas once again, with terrorists planning to use chemical weapons in the area, it is up to you as Bishop and his team to locate and take these people down. The game is spread over seven acts, these range from rooftop fights to the casino floor and each area is well represented. Though the outcome is linear, the way to get there depends on your preferred route, there are a few options in each scenario that you can choose between, at times you will be updated over the radio with intel or you can use the snake cam to locate and tag enemies. There are rooms which you can burst through a skylight, rappel and shoot through a window or even command a multi-entrance into a room and take the terrorists out by surprise with a well placed flash bang.
You control your own character in the classic FPS way, but you also have a few additions, the Left Trigger allows you to stay close to walls, this will let you sneak to a corner and peak around, from here you can blind fire or lean out and shoot, the movement is very swift and only requires use of the control stick rather than a few buttons at a time. Due to the amount of commands available, some of the buttons are context sensitive, the Y button can pick up weapons and change weapons. The A button will always change depending on your environment, with this you can command the team to move to a selected point, just aim you cursor and click A, when close to a door you can use the snake can to see what’s on the other side, get close to a railing and you can even rappel down the wall.
Rather than collect items or purchase them from a shop you have the new character upgrade system, with each kill you will gain XP, the better the kill, the higher the XP reward and as you earn more XP, you will obtain new weapons and armour. This system is in both the single player and online functions.
Online play really helps the longevity of this title, and in the end, most people will end up playing here, there are 12 maps for up to 16 players to choose from and a healthy amount of play types. Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch are there, but there is also Team Leader, where you need to protect a VIP whilst trying to take out the enemies, Total Conquest and Attack and Defend also make an appearance. There is also a large amount of customization available such as what weapons are available to use or what time limits you set. A great addition to online is the ability to play the story mode co-op, find yourself a good team and there will be some amazing firefights.
The game does fall on some bad habits, like the lack of buttons on a control pad, this was always a problem that I experienced on older games and it rears it head here again, though not as bad. Due to the context sensitive nature of the some of the buttons, there are times when the incorrect command appears. A horrible situation arose when trying to change grenade types whilst holding Y, unfortunately instead of changing grenade it picked up a downed terrorist weapon and threw away my sniper rifle, right in the middle of a firefight, lets just say it did not end well. Combined to this is the amount of commands available, at times you will forget what button does what action at certain points and you will issue incorrect commands, this is more of a learning curve but still irritating. There is also the problem of your AI teammates getting stuck, a few times you will issue a command for a certain point and they will get stuck behind a wall, though this does not occur often, it still helps the game to lose some of it’s realism.
While this isn’t a great deal different from the first game in the series, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six 2 is a very good game and it is worth adding to your collection if you are a big fan of tactical shooters such as this.
