Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 (Xbox 360)

As you kill tangos, you’re given regular XP (variable based on the difficulty setting, with the highest rewards being for Realistic) along with your ACES XP (again varies depending on difficulty settings, between Casual and Realistic, Normal gives you the same ACES as Realistic). You are given unlocks per milestone in your ACES, these vary from new weapons to XP boost awards (500, 1000, 4000, 5000 and so on) as you get closer to your maximum ACES rank 20.

As you gain your regular XP you’ll change rank and that will unlock even more goodies, from new armours to extra camouflage patterns and visual upgrades that can be used to further evolve the look of your character so you can create a pretty unique personalised Bishop for your experience. As in Vegas you can change attachments on your weapons and there’s still only 1 attachment that can be used at any given time, so you have to pick wisely. The cover system in Vegas 2 remains untouched from Vegas (thankfully) and to further add realism to the game, each weapon possesses a penetration value that can chew through light materials and some hardened concrete. It’s wise to try and take cover behind something heavy and metal since a big gun will rip right through and kill you in a couple of shots.

There are 11 new guns and completely new maps added to the game, with the singleplayer story taking place in brightly lit daytime locales now as well as seedy Vegas rooftops and back alleys. Terrorist Hunt has been revamped and there are new maps added for multiplayer with several maps you could unlock if you had the code or if you have an Ubisoft account. The game rewards old players by giving them a rank advantage and welcoming them back, this rank is not enough to unbalance the game however since the weapons are unlocked through the ACES and not ranks.

Multiplayer has been overhauled and you can system link or play split screen with a friend over the whole singleplayer game, complete with your AI team. Player one (Bishop) has full control over the tactical use of the team whilst Player Two (Knight) joins in as support and acts as a silent partner to the action that’s going on. You’re allowed to take on Terrorist Hunts with four players and there’s no option to allow more than one person to play the singleplayer story with you. This we feel might have been a bit of an oversight, but understand that it would mean reworking new custom characters into the story and they would require dialogue, both for male and female characters.

The adversarial multiplayer has been changed a little, there are new modes to go along with the various maps and Vegas 2 has very little in the way of server based hiccups online. It does have some issues we’ll come to later on in the review, mostly to deal with Terrorist Hunts and glitches that were noticed in multiplayer, especially across the singleplayer co-operative portion of the game.

There are new modes as previously mentioned, like Team Leader where you have to kill the opposing team’s leader to prevent their ability to respawn. Respawns in the game are based on the difficulty level (in Terrorist Hunts) and in the co-op campaign you can continually respawn as long as either Bishop or Knight is alive. If both of you die, its game over, if the team goes down (Jung, Michael) its game over. You’ll restart at a checkpoint of course and these are mostly well placed.