Rainbow Six Las Vegas … Again.

Just after Christmas this year I picked up an xbox 360 at the beckoning of a few of my co-workers.  I am not disappointed in the least, in that decision but that situation is not the point of this review.  The downfall of picking up the Xbox 360 this far into it’s life cycle is that I missed a bunch of really good games that had already been released.  One of them being the famed Rainbow Six: Las Vegas, published by Ubisoft and developed by their boys in Montreal.  Quite a few of my coworkers had fallen in love with the original and had mentioned that the sequel was not too far off.

So I followed the Dev Diaries, watched the gameplay trailers and decided that this game could fill that dark black void of a good Co-op shooter that wouldn’t have existed if COD4 hadn’t completely missed the boat in that area.  I was hooked, I plunked down my $59.99 the day of the release and gave it a shot.  3 weeks later I popped it out of my Xbox disc drive, traded it to some guy from the interwebs for Bioshock and put COD4 back in it’s rightful place as shooter that eats too much of my time.  Over the next little bit I’ll outline what I liked about the game and also look at why I traded away this game for a purely single player experience as I had bought this game for it’s Co-op in the first place.

Before I take stabs at this game in a more precise fashion, I’d like to outline what the game did right.  As I stated earlier, the main reason I purchased this game as I wanted a decent shooter that had good Co-op and wasn’t named Gears of War.  This seemed to fit the bill perfectly as the nice big bullet points on the back of the box so clearly stated, players could jump in and out of each others games without problems and without even being at the same point in their own story.  This was an amazing feature and was implemented very well.  Secondly, the graphics were up to snuff, as it used the Unreal Engine (which is pretty much the de facto standard today, but I digress) which made the town of Las Vegas look good as you crawled through people’s backyards, convention centers and casinos.  Lastly, they did a fairly good job on the controls.  It has taken me a long while to get used to first person shooters on consoles as I grew up on the PC playing the likes of Descent, Tribes, and Half Life using the mouse and keyboard combo.  COD4 is the prom queen of controls for first person shooters on consoles, and Rainbow Six 2 is easily the smart chick who only lost cause her friends were sick the day of the vote.

Now that I got that out of the way, I can get to the part of this review where I rip the game a new one.  I buy games in the hopes of getting the entire package.  A great single player campaign and an amazing multiplayer.  When games get both of those right, it’s like having the best steak in the world and then the chef knowing exactly what you want for dessert.  It gives you a reason to keep going back to that restaurant.  RSV2 dropped the ball in both the steak and dessert, and that’s the reason I traded it and got a Big Daddy instead.  Firstly, I had zero experience with the first iteration of this game and thus had no idea where the story had gone.  The game dropped me right into the middle of some terrorist war with no explanation, the story was lacking, but it did easily point out I was to kill all the guys shooting at me and not the guys standing beside me.  Several times during the game my so-called AI teammates would either get stuck in the floor, stop following me completely, go in a different door then I told them, or completely leave me high and dry when I called.  I found unless I was right behind them constantly giving orders, they were pretty much useless meat shields.  I also ran into quite a few bugs such as spelling mistakes and numerous hard crashes.  All of which in today’s world of high priced games, is fairly unacceptable.  The single player campaign was repetitive, but the varied buildings and settings made things a tad interesting.  *SPOILER AHEAD* For a game that prided itself as a “Tactical Shooter”, the end boss battle was completely out of left field, it had you fight a giant attack helicopter after teaching you section after section to “Door/Smoke/Clear” repeat.  It was a decent change of pace, but absolutely out of place in terms of the rest of the game.  I would have really liked to been in that game design meeting.  “OK guys, we’re gonna have people sneak around maps for 10 hours, but at the end we’re gonna fly in a MASSIVE helicopter and let them duke it out.”

I could have easily overlooked all of that if they had gotten the multiplayer right.  Games with bad single player experiences can be easily redeemed if they make killing my friends fun.  RSV2, did not do this, in fact they made it very difficult.  A few notable FPS games have been released since Rainbow Six Vegas 1 and they have figured out how to do multiplayer.  The server join system that RSV2 implemented was archaic, cumbersome and made joining games very difficult.  When I play multiplayer I want to join a game with buddies in less then 5 minutes.  I don’t want to spend 15 minutes joining a game, play 1 map and then get kicked due to “team shuffling” or whatever crap they called it.  Halo 3 did multiplayer right with allowing you quick invites to your buddies, quick joins to game types and a great overall communication system.  Take heed Ubisoft, multiplayer is evolving and this is not Xbox Live circa 2000.  I will commend their design choice on one thing though, allowing players to rank up in single player and it transfer to multiplayer was a good choice.

I hate giving games ratings and arbitrary numbers in hopes of finding a score.  So I’m going to take a different approach.  Is this game worth your hard earned gaming dollars? Well, if you can find this game used for $29.99 or less I would say pick it up and give it a shot.  If you are walking into GameStop and it’s on the new shelf for $59.99, you can do better at full price then this decent but flawed shooter.