Sloppy, poorly executed and unfinished
The first Rainbow 6 Vegas was a superb, tactical crawl through Sin City's most glamorous spots. It has a strong campaign, excellent multiplayer, and at the time was one of the best games to grace the year old 360. Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 arrived little over twelve months later with barely enough time to make sure its shoes were tied and its hair looked alright...and by God does it show.
"Rush job" is not a title we especially delight in branding games with. In the past it was the sort of tag associated with EA (particularly their sports franchises) until they got their act together, and isn't bandied about often. There's a reason for that; to most developers, their game is a labour of love, so they spend an inordinate amount of time polishing it and striving to ensure it's a well presented and slick piece of software before releasing it into the wild. This doesn't appear to have been the case with R6V2. Ubisoft Montreal have released what is essentially an unfinished game. Don't criticise just yet, allow us to elaborate.
We aren't saying the development team didn't do their best for the game to be a success. What we're saying is that they needed more time. It's understandable that Ubisoft management wanted their sequel out the door and onto shelves as soon as humanly possible, but it wouldn't be unreasonable to suggest that not enough time was afforded for the Montreal studio to create the best product possible. Simply put, Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 is not a good game. Infact, it just barely scrapes into the realms of average.
Essentially it's the first game plus one. Then minus ten. Some locations are recycled and the plot follows the same old thread from a different viewpoint, dragging the player through Vegas' less glamorous side, including downtown areas, junkyards and large, empty convention centres. Unfortunately, this is not why anyone visits the place in the real world, and it doesn't exactly let you lap up the sights like the original did. The gameplay remains largely untouched, bar a few features "borrowed" from Call of Duty 4, and to its credit it is still solid in that aspect. The biggest new addition comes in the shape of persistent character building through all the modes, and it works well, giving you a real sense of attachment to your soldier as you build up points in the pretty nicely implemented ACES system for XP and other rewards.
So far, so R6V.5, but unfortunately the glitchy nature of the first game remains intact in an even greater degree. Considering it was the main complaint last time round this could be pretty hard to believe, but once you've had to actually give up on the campaign because it's running at under 30 fps and skipping 90% horrendously, you'll know what we mean. What could have been a solid if unremarkable squad based shooter turns into an utter farce of broken single player and incomprehensibly laggy online play. Once you actually get into a lobby, a Herculian task itself, you're left to contend with the unplayable mush Ubisoft try to pass off for multiplayer. Bullets don't connect, disconnections are rife, and it simply doesn't work half the time. It's unfinished, and this is whatwe noted previously, there obviously wasn't enough time to get the core issues ironed out.
Yes, R6V2 has some neat ideas, but there's nothing worse than an utterly broken game, and although some fun can be squeezed out from Co-Op Terrorist Hunts, it simply doesn't justify the hassle. There may seem few grounds for complaints otherwise, but there's no doubt that a large chunk of the players have had similar experiences, and this is the kind of practice that turns potentially decent games into ones that come within a stone's throw of dire. It doesn't help that the graphics are dated, the environments are boring and the crux of the game is nigh on identical to the first, but sadly problems like those we experienced exist are unforgivable and result only in the wasting of a good thirty pounds.
(This review was originally posted on my Games You Should Buy blog, so please excuse the "we" and "us" remarks)
