Are you up for losing more than your hard-earned money at the strip? Well then, welcome to Las Vegas, here we have more bandits than civilians, and toxic gas releases by terrorists are a daily occurrence. Enjoy your stay! When I started to play Rainbow Six: VEGAS 2, I expected Swat 4 type of gameplay, but what I got was all-out warfare with hundreds of militias running around on the strip gunning for your head. While you do get a lot of bad guys to put holes into, it kinda undermines the Swat aspect of the game. It becomes like any type of military engagement but set in an entirely urban environment with slot machines as far as the eye can see.
What are we doing?
This might be a shameful thing, but the story never grabbed me, so I don’t know too much about what we were doing. Not that there is much story to absorb to begin with, if I’m totally honest. You play as Bishop, leader of a three-man Rainbow Six unit, and your job is to stop terrorists from doing terrorist things in Las Vegas. It does have a twist and a betrayal in here too, all to increase the tension and drama, but like I said, I found it very hard to care, even a little. One of the reasons for this is just how absurd the situation becomes rather quickly.
See, the game starts kinda low-key, with a few engagements and a couple of Swat breach scenarios. However, as soon as the real game begins, it goes from something semi-plausible to all-out warfare. It’s a game and all, and fairly arcady at that, so I understand the need for having tons of bad dudes to kill, but every enemy is the same militia type with a death wish. You will be killing hundreds of these dudes in balaclava and green uniforms equipped with the latest in weaponry. I didn’t find the shooting to be that good, and god forbid, I grew tired of all the blasting, and I’m a pop-a-mole blasting kind of guy!
Breach & clear
One of the selling points for getting the game in the first place is that you control a team. A gameplay aspect I think it is really fun when it works. And it does to a large degree in Rainbow Six: VEGAS 2, as your teammates will prove to be pretty competent with defending and killing. However, on the difficulty I played at (hard), using your team becomes the only thing to use to advance on the missions. That is because the game constantly throws annoying ambushes in your face, which often translates to you getting domed in the head from across the map by some pesky sniper imitating Simo Häyhä.
The solution to his problem? Send in your comrades first! These guys can’t even die, I doubt they are even human. I think they might be zombies resurrected for police purposes since I have seen them eat sniper rounds and machinegun fire like it’s candy. They do go down, eventually, but it’s easy to get them back up again. Just inject them with some T-virus and they are ready to genocide more bad guys.
There are parts of the map where you do get to feel like a Swat team, but these are pretty rare. Usually, it’s the endgame section of each mission where you actually get to plan your approach a little. It consists of placing a team at one door, while you breach the other. Most of the game will be played as a normal shooter with added companions to absorb some damage. Luckily the game is not very long, but still, I grew tired of it fast, as I mentioned. It does not even have any cool death animations. It’s all very bland, just like general gameplay.
I must mention that the mission before the final part of the game has you going solo. There is no real explanation why, not that I remember anyway. From here on out you must kill forty or so terrorists by yourself. This segment was a real pain in the ass on the hard setting since the game keeps throwing ambushes and men at you like you still have the team with you. And each time you die, you will have to start from the beginning. Is this what hell looks like?
The Vegas look
That is not the only thing that is bland. The environments are incredibly spartan and dull looking. Some areas look like liminal spaces, a thing that became a popular horror meme on YouTube. So, if you are into that, you might actually appreciate the locations. Sound, music, and enemy barks fall under the same category. To me, the product just feels phoned in and is not of the same usual quality as other Ubisoft games from that time period. It doesn’t have the graphics, nor the sound, and absolutely not the story.
In conclusion
I bought Rainbow Six: VEGAS 2 for two bucks at the Ubisoft store, hoping to get some tactical team action, and in parts I did. However, I don’t recommend Rainbow Six: VEGAS 2 for even that low amount of money. Everything in this game is stale and monotonous. Not even the shooting saves it, which is the case for many first-person shooters otherwise. It’s way too arcady for what it tries to be. While it does have deadly bullet damage with a minimum of enemy bloat, everything else surrounding this title is pretty bad, from suicidal terrorists that might as well have been Doom monsters to extremely flat-looking locations. Avoid!
Thanks for reading.
/Thomas
Tom's Gaming Vault 