Rainbow Six Vegas 2 Review

I've been bitching about this game, my friend suggested I should write a review. So I will.

I bought my xbox about a year back. Vegas was one of the games I got with it, I loved it. It was a lot of fun, regardless of its shortcomings. I don't get much use of my 360 anymore and I'm trying to sell it, I would of sold it before but vegas 2 was supposed to be the successor to the game I first loved so I waited for it. Later I found out it was on the PC and got that. What a mistake.

Metacritic gives vegas 1 a 89/100 (xbox wise) and 83/100 for vegas 2, so you'd assume it'd be maybe just as good (prehaps slightly worse) then its predecessor? Nope, ubisoft ripped us all off.

The game features a better system for getting your equipment all over again through specialized points of some kind, has slightly better graphics (but not near the leap with vegas 1) and few gameplay changes. The engine itself makes itself painfully obvious that its the same vegas 1 engine with improvements. Not many improvements were made at all, its a very lazy sequel.

The sound still randomly cuts out. I have no idea why they couldn't fix a bug from the first game, but its there with great frequency, theres no way they couldn't of picked up on that. One of the things they promised was better AI. I've seen them go as far as to try to block my view by shooting extinguishers (which doesn't do much to stop me), tell each other to "aim for the head" or "aim for their leader" which doesn't seem very realistic of terrorists to say to each other much less even do in all circumstances. The last thing is the extremely watered down gameplay.

One of my complaints with the first game was how useless sniper rifles, the armor system and silencers were (all my favourite things). They're even more useless now since there's not very much of an advantage with any of them. Inaccurate submachine guns have the same headshotting ability as my sniper rifle, because almost all the time you'll be in close quarters or controlling your shots. The game punishes you for not wearing full armor since the game appears to be designed around the fact that probably everybody is going to wear full armor so theres really no point in even including the armor feature in the game. Last the silencers are absolutely useless since majority of the time you're only supposed to use them in certain situations when the game wants you to, the rest of the time your foes have ESP and automatically know where you are.

The other problem is with the fact that now the AI can one hit kill you, you'll be going back a fair bit. There is so much scripting in this game that after you've done the same encounter like 4 times, you automatically know where everybody is, or will come out, and it never changes. It's like duck hunt with assault rifles (the ducks get them too). If you dare to deviate from the predefined gameplay the developers set out, they will punish you for it. So the only reason you'd be doing anything differently is purely for style, which means nothing.

The story is absolutely horrible. It was bad enough they left the last game in a cliffhanger, I have not got to the ending (im close though) but what is supposed to be the climax is boring me to death. It gets worse, the voice acting of everybody in the game is really bad (especially the character you play as, "Bishop", whom you can be male or female). I like games that get me excited when the characters sound like they're in those situations. Logan from the first game was a pretty good voice actor, but both the male and the female voice actors for this game sound so dull.

Speaking about how lazy the sound is for this game, I found that like the first game, a lot of dialog/sound effects don't sync up with whats happening on screen. Its like watching a dubbed movie. Whats worse is that most of the sound effects are the exact same from the first game. Even the music is the same from the first game.

The AI in both campaign and terrorist hunt haven't changed much. Regardless of a silencer, they all walk out in a linear fashion from wherever they are spawning from and come magically to where you are. No coordination, no "oh wow look at that pile of bodies, maybe I shouldn't go there", no "the guy in front of me just died, I'll just go exactly where he was going".

You could argue "don't fix what ain't broke", but then don't charge me 50 bucks for what ain't broke.

Almost every review site out there does some sort of weird score out of 100 that means very little. My score will be out of 5. A perfect 5 doesn't mean the game is perfect, but it means you should definitely buy it because its a great game even if you aren't a fan of shooter genre. A 0/5 means avoid at all costs.

Rainbow Six Vegas 2 score: 1/5.
Buy it if you never played vegas 1 and you're a huge fanboy, but you can easily save yourself 30 bucks and just play vegas 1. It's much of the same thing.