Rainbow Six Vegas 2

Aug. 12, 2008

One of the dilemmas posed by the one-hour game reviews is that I live alone and thus don't often have the ability to play multiplayer games in person with someone else. Tonight I went over a friend's house to play a game I'd never played before, and so I took the opportunity to examine how I feel when I play with someone else in person. Instead of just playing single-player, this time all I did was coop.

Category

Tactical FPS

Pros

• Lots of guns, outfits, armors, etc. to choose from, and lots of modifications to aforementioned items on top of that. My friend made his character look like a storm trooper.
• I found the basic game mechanics very solid. The cover system worked well, and even though I normally have problems with using a joystick for FPS I found myself able to kill things after a bit of learning.
• In fact, the game itself is basically solid, with the exception of the AI (see cons).
• Major kudos to the devs for making the restart of a map super fast. When we lost, we were back to playing again in just a few clicks. That is awesome.
• Flashbangs work very realistically in this game. If you're not looking at it, your screen doesn't get screwy. Neat.
• Playing with someone else means that you can have "wow" moments. Wow moments are those times when something awesome happens and everyone laughs about it, such as when you take out four people with a grenade or you shoot across each other to get bad guys. RSV2 provided plenty of these moments, which was enjoyable.

Cons

• The unlockable weapons systems in CoD4 and RSV2 are, in my opinion, unfair. I wanted to be able to chill with a friend for an hour or two and play. Instead, he had a shield and I couldn't get one because I'd need to level more to use one. This is frustrating, especially for local play.
• You couldn't play online split-screen, which I found odd. It's not like PSN charges for accounts, there's no reason to force the existence of two PS3s for online play.
• We were only playing on the normal difficulty, and the AI was dumb. I mean really dumb. They'd file through the level in lines, seemingly ignorant of any danger around any corner. You'd throw a grenade and they'd run towards it. In fact, the only thing the AI had going for it was numbers, since there were usually 35 of them against 2 of us; if they ran around enough they would surround us.

Verdict

If I was playing it with a friend, I could play this game for hours, just due to playing with a friend. But I don't think I'd play it online or single-player without it being on the PC, and even then it seems like a slightly worst (ever so slightly) CoD4 clone.