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Ubisofts release of Rainbow Six Vegas 2 had a lot of excited gamers ready to find out if it would be better than the first release, which was a major success. Return to Sin City in Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2, the highly successful sequel. This time, the stakes have been raised. It's your chance to rescue America's wildest city from an escalating terrorist siege. With massively expanded multiplayer, new seamless co-op, and customizable character creation, you have the tools to put an end to the terrorist threat for good.
Because Vegas 2 uses the same Unreal Engine used in the first game, Ubisoft has been able to spend more development time improving the artificial intelligence, graphics, and multiplayer experience. There are 11 new weapons in Vegas 2, and some of the existing weapons have been tweaked - the shotgun reload speed, for example, has been increased from somewhat sluggish to a speedy half-second between shots. The changes in bullet penetration mean that choosing your weapon has taken on a new level of importance. The physics associated with your chosen cover will determine how much damage you'll sustain when hiding behind it - while solid concrete and metal are pretty hard to penetrate, hiding behind a plywood wall is just asking for trouble.
Loading times have been significantly improved. No more waiting for eons to the map to load. This should hold true as well for online games full of people using the face-mapping feature, something that Ubisoft admitted caused significant slowdowns in the previous game.
The entire matchmaking has undergone some significant overhauls as well, but most of those are under the hood. Gamers should see the results when they have an easier time finding a game with other people at their same connection speed, skill level and P.E.C. (Persistent Elite Creation) level. So you should be facing people that have earned access to the same weapons that you have. Any temptation to be gun-crazy, sloppy or just plain careless in the knowledge that you can use infinite numbers of heals on team-mates quickly vanishes as soon as you come up against the first group of terrorists in the first level. Three new multiplayer modes are excellent additions and flesh out the game in rather unexpected directions. In demolition mode, one team must plant a bomb at one of two target sites and protect it until it explodes while the other team tries to defuse it.
Team Leader, where each side must keep its leader alive and escort him to an extraction point. As long as the leader is alive, the rest of the team can respawn as many times as they like weather next to him or back at base, any one killed by a leader is killed for good.
Total Conquest encourages attacking play, with teams needing to capture all three satellites at the same time and hold them for 30 seconds.
Terrorist mode is also playable online. Good communication skills is more than important when playing online, if you haven’t already got a microphone – then you should get one if you decide to buy Vegas 2.
While it comes short of Call of Duty 4, the persistent levelling-up system and improved multiplayer means Vegas 2 does enough to convince us its worth a return visit.
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