Tuesday, March 25, 2008

What happens in Vegas really should stay there.

Rainbow Six fans have been awaiting Rainbow Six Vegas 2 for awhile now and it's finally hit store shelves should you rush out and get it? Well no sadly. I will say this, if you are a fan of Rainbow Six you will love Vegas 2 despite what I'm about to say.

I remember playing Vegas when it 1st came out on 360 and thought wow this looks great and its amazing how new the game play is from past Rainbow Six games. That was then and this is now and Vegas 2 looks and plays almost exactly like Vegas 1 and after seeing and playing things like Gears of War and Uncharted it just isn't acceptable.

Vegas has nothing fatally wrong with it. It's a bunch of little things combined that will bug you more and more over the course of the game. First off the graphics they just don't hold up against most of the games coming out now. It looks like Ubisoft just rehashed the old Vegas engine and didn't tweak it at all. There are portions of the game that are down right ugly but for the most part the graphics are simply serviceable. Another annoyance is that the lip syncing is horrid almost nothing any of the characters say match with the way their mouths are moving and its really bad here. Other bugs involve your squad often getting lost and left behind in a level. On one of the levels my mission was to get to a train and disarm a bomb. Upon reaching the train I ordered my squad to disarm it. However nothing happened because the "bomb disarming guy" had gotten lost over the course of the mission. I then had to restart and baby sit the bomb guy to make sure I didn't have to repeat the process again. That's not all either, countless times when I ordered my team to Open a door and clear the room they wouldn't. Upon further investigation I found one or sometime both of my squad members staring at a wall as if it was the love of their lives. The fact that these bugs appeared as often as they did is a bit disturbing. Also taking a que from Call of Duty 4, Vegas 2 now has a penetration system. However unlike COD4 it doesn't work to well. Here is a prime example. There is a system in the game that allows you to see your enemies locations with a satellite. In a certain area in a convention center I used said satellite to discover that one of my enemies was standing on the other side of a cloth wall. I then proceeded to unload an entire clip into said wall. Now logic would dictate that his choice of cover should have proven fatal. NOT SO. He somehow was unharmed and proceeded to come around the corner and kill my squad mate. Again this happens far to often to be considered a glitch.

On the bright side the game play is very tight. It's not much different then Vegas 1 but the game play from Vegas was pretty tight to begin with. There is a new A.C.E.S system which is just a fancy way of saying you can make a character. However the options are very limited and not very fun to mess with. There are quite abit of things to do online but then again this is a Rainbow Six game so you know what you are expecting. The game uses a system similar to COD4's unlocking system in which you gain experience and unlock stuff the higher you get and when I say similar I mean total ripoff.

It's odd Call of Duty 4 and Rainbow Six Vegas 2 are very different styles of game. However they both have a similar theme in that they take place in modern times. It's hard not to be comparing the 2 even if they are in the end very different. With how great Call of Duty 4 is when you compare Vegas is just gonna lose. However like I said the games are very different in game play. Call of Duty 4 is far more action like and Rainbow Six is very much the thinking mans FPS. If you loved past Rainbow Six games you are gonna love Vegas. It's just sad that they didn't polish the game a bit more before release.

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