So, looking back in my posts, I played through the first Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas game back in January of 2008.  It’s taken me a while to get to the sequel, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas: 2.

I spell out the entire name because it’s just so gosh darned ridiculous.  I will henceforth refer to the first game as R6V and its sequel as R6V2.

That kind of sounds like a flu strain, though, like “Hey, where’s Bob today?” “Aw, man, he caught R6V2, he’s going to be puking his guts up for a week.”

Not that R6V2 made me sick, or anything.

Much like the first game, it was pretty fun.  I don’t play many games in this particular genre – note that it took me 23 months to play the second game after finishing the first – so I really can’t critique it next to other tactical FPS games, but I liked it.  It was a little frustrating in a couple of spots, but I did  play through on “Normal” instead of “Casual”, so I really can’t fuss too much about getting hung up.

I was a bit confused by the story for a while, though.  See, R6V ends with a Big Reveal and a cliffhanger ending, and I kind of expected R6V2 to pick up from where R6V left off.  This turned out not to be the case; R6V2 takes place concurrently with the first game. This actually makes sense, though, because the last level of R6V has you LEAVING Vegas, so if they made a game that picked up directly from that point you wouldn’t actually be in Vegas and they couldn’t name it Tom Clancy’s Rainbox Six Vegas 2, they’d have to name it Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Leaving Los Vegas or something.

It does, however, have a level that goes beyond the events of R6V and DOES resolve the story once and for all, so that gets good marks from me.

Even if it isn’t in Vegas.

Let’s see, what else can I say about it?  Well, it’s not quite as pretty as the first game, because you don’t spend most of the game shooting up casinos. You do GO to a casino at least once, but most of the levels are, like, a library and a recreation center and some other fairly dull environments.  On the other hand, if it were just another five casino levels bookended by non-casino bits, it would have been kind of samey.

It does have AI partners who are perhaps a little too smart; they’re really good at killing stuff so you don’t have to.  This is made extremely evident on the level where they get assigned to a different mission and you have to play solo.

I died a lot on that level.

What else can I say…

It has kind of a weird little XP / leveling system, where you get XP from kills you make or that your AI partners make and you unlock new guns and uniform pieces as you level up.  This sort of thing is all the rage these days.

It does give you incentive to put yourself in harms way, because you get more XP from killing stuff by yourself instead of leaving it up to your AI partners, but it doesn’t seem to have a whole lot of in-game effect.  It’s one of those features that probably makes quite a difference in multiplayer. I’ll never know.  🙂

Overall, it’s, well, it’s a sequel to a game that’s really cheap to buy these days and which I thought was quite worth trying out even though it wasn’t really in my normal genres and didn’t have any cute girls in glasses; if you enjoy the first game, it won’t cost much to try the sequel as well. What more can I add?