Just because Ubisoft had found a new idea to give them a big breakthrough, it didn’t mean that they weren’t going to carry on with what already worked too. So: their fifth Tom Clancy game to reach UK #1, which means, as of September 2022, that we’re halfway through that particular set. And after Army of Two, the second new #1 in a row to be both about a small pseudo-military team fighting on behalf of the USA, and made by developers based in Montréal. This model wasn’t just still working, but multiplying.
Compared not just to the horrors of Army of Two but to the Tom Clancy standard, Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 is pretty tame on the imperialism and fear-mongering front. There are chemical weapons being smuggled in from Mexico, and people aiming to blow up various bits of Las Vegas, because obviously. The main bad guy, though is a former Rainbow Six member who failed to follow orders in the interactive prologue and wants to take out his resentment on a grand scale. (Failing to follow orders being the worst thing you can do in the Tom Clancy Ludomatic Universe unless you are the protagonist)
Remaining members have no problem following your orders. You are in the command position of an army of three, just to change things up, and you can move them around as you like and tell them to clear out rooms in various ways. They can both take a lot more damage than you and be healed after taking too much, so sending them ahead to do all the dirty work is frequently the best strategy, especially when encountering snipers. It cuts back slightly on your options compared to some predecessors, but it’s still both more fiddly and less satisfying than the tight mechanics of Army of Two, without its increased level of realism or anything else reaching a level to compensate.
As you hold back in cover and let your colleagues get to work, the game switches from first person to third person view. This is to give you a chance to get a better look at your self-created character, which is where much of the game’s emphasis goes. You can pick their gender and looks, and you can also upgrade their armour in various ways, trading off manoeuvrability and toughness. Different types of armour unlock as you gain experience and level up, in one of the clearer examples to date of the RPG-ification of games at large.
If you don’t manage to get through one of Vegas 2’s generously short sequences between checkpoints, you can try it again with new knowledge and practice. You can also retain the experience points you gained from anyone you did manage to kill along the way. Close-range kills, long-range kills, headshots and shots from behind all register separately, and in theory your stats build up in line with the play approach you take. That also extends across modes of the game, so you can take your own Bishop with you online or in the plot-free Terrorist Hunt mode.
In practice, the little dopamine hits of numbers visibly rising are a lot more effective than the tactical element of it. It’s much the same as how directing your team to progress is satisfying for receiving a set of positive messages in response, more than any real feeling of having out-thought the enemy. Where earlier Rainbow Six games went out of their way to make you feel clever without needing to be, Vegas 2 builds that into a whole machinery to constantly drip-feed that feeling and connect it across however you choose to play it.
With even less need for plot or locations to go with it, a conveyer belt of yearly releases could be all the easier implemented. Vegas 2 is already the proof of that process in fact: barely more than an extension pack for the first game released 18 months earlier, with some illegibly ugly posters in its Vegas as strong evidence of the rush. That wasn’t a great view of what things could be in a new gaming age, but it turned out to be a frequently accurate one.
Top of the charts for week ending 22 March 2008:
