Vegas 2 is shameless. It knows it’s a good game. It’s smug. It barely even needs you to be there to appreciate it, because its father was a pure thoroughbred. It’s self-assured in its genetic heritage; another foray into a world of stacking entry points and breaching the hell out of Mexican terrorists. So why should it care what we think? Why should it bother itself with our somewhat apathetic tears as we sit, forced to watch one of our favourite games of 2006 failing to ignite the same beauty it once did?

The true beauty of Rainbow Six Vegas was that did so many things right that the common faults of FPS gameplay were beaten beyond recognition. No longer were the only tactics available either to run at them screaming your head off, hoping your health doesn’t bottom out, or to wait around a corner for them to pop their heads out one by one. Instead you could, for example, stick to cover and pop out while the other guy reloads, ask your squaddies to take up a suppressing position allowing you to flank, or indeed any other way you would care to think your way out of a tight spot. The pace was slow, thoughtful and incredibly atmospheric, especially with its heartmatching, pumping soundtrack that was pulsating away during the quieter, more intense skirmishes.

But we should have seen this coming, because the title is an allegory for the entire gameplay experience and indeed is the lynchpin on which your decision to spend your money or not, hinges. Let’s just get our tongues around that title again. Rainbow Six Vegas 2. You have to question why instead, we’re not playing Rainbow Six New York, Rainbow Six London or hell, even Rainbow Six Swindon would have been a step forward. Everything else aside, the game’s title amounts to a soured bucket of laziness that someone’s clumsily spilled all over the gameplay. Don’t get us wrong; where the original was good, Vegas 2 is also good, but the differences are so minor that those who’ve played Vegas will find them far too easy to ignore.

Last time out, you had a mini-map, which showed the position of the enemy at all times. This makes a return, but this time in the form of a thermal scan which can only be used for a brief period every few minutes. It’s easy to see why the change has been made: someone obviously believed that things become a mite easier when your Spec Ops team can use a psychic radar. But in the grand scheme of things, it’s difficult to see it as an improvement. The mini-map allowed you to plan tactically, use your team more effectively to take advantage of the enemy flank and most importantly, to spend less time walking the long road from the last checkpoint after being shot in the head by an unseen sharpshooter.

Running between cover is now made quicker and easier with the addition of a sprint button. Hold down the left bumper and your speed will double for a few seconds. It’s extremely familiar to that which appears in Call Of Duty 4. We wonder whether the developer has played that game? Well, evidently it has, because the XP system of the first Rainbow Six Vegas has made it over to the single-player campaign, albeit with COD 4’s ever-present progress bar taking up far too much room at the bottom of the screen. It’s a keen idea to introduce both character creation and rank levelling to the single-player campaign, which can then be carried across to the multiplayer, although we question whether an overcrowded HUD is a worthwhile trade-off. Levelling up is taken care of in the form of the usual progress through military rank, each awarding the player additional outfit options such as new body armour, various bits and bobs to bolt onto your firearms and clothing options for those of you who never got Spec Ops Barbie for Christmas.

The story is polyfiller to the holes in the first game. Those parts where you finished an objective, jumped in a helicopter and discovered that ten shades of sh*t had hit the fan in the five seconds since you boarded are now explored in a little more detail. What becomes evident is that these events aren’t really where the most exciting stuff was happening, and while some were mentioned in video-comms during Vegas, they are not as worthy. When push comes to shove, what you have here is Mexican terrorists attempting to cause a megadeath event in Las Vegas which is, as the keener minds among you will have noted, the same as last time.

Rather than stealthily moving your squad from slot to slot in some of Vegas’ best-known casinos, Ubisoft has at the very least attempted to provide a different background to your carefully orchestrated slaughter. Apart from the training mission, set five years earlier and in an Alpine setting, the majority of the locations in Vegas 2 reside in the parts of Las Vegas not drenched in neon light. From convention centre to junkyard, to the back gardens of suburbia, the game is keen to avoid environmental repetition wherever it can and for that at least, it needs to be commended. However, the ‘Big Idea’ that led to the creation of Rainbow Six Vegas was all about the neon money-pits of Sin City. While an exact repetition, environmentally speaking, doesn’t even warrant consideration, keeping things in Vegas is nevertheless likely to have been a financial decision rather than a creative one. Because despite more mundane, dare we say more boring, settings, a great deal of the first game’s assets have been unashamedly reused. Remember the stonking incidental music we recalled earlier in the review? It’s back. The voiceacting for squad-mates and enemy NPCs? Back. Some of the enemies themselves? Back. Environmental objects, from slot machines to tables to video monitors? Back. We simply don’t see this level of repetition in the vast majority of sequels and while we hesitate to call it laziness – and, afterall, it is Vegas 2 at the end of the day – it’s difficult to find a better term with which to describe it.

It’s amazing to think that what looked and felt very passable at the end of 2006 now seems quite ugly and bland. Any game staking its place in 2008’s market, now has better-looking, better-playing benchmarks with which to contest. It’s in this respect that despite Vegas 2 being a near carbon copy of its forebear, it somehow manages to come off worse. It still looks like a first-generation 360 title. The gun models are flat and bland, the environments are mostly as large as they are sparse and lighting is lifeless and static. Also, aspects of shooter gameplay that we now consider to form part of the base rate of modern FPS currency are conspicuously absent from Rainbow Six Vegas 2’s vault. Cover, for example. Even paper-thin tables can be neither shot through, nor destroyed. And while bringing in a friend using the new dropin, drop-out co-op feature certainly turns down the volume on the inconsistencies, co-op should also be considered a ‘cost of entry’ feature.

Having reached this point with barely a good word to say about it, you must be gawking at the score in wonderment at our lenience. But whether Vegas 2 is derivative, un-evolved and downright stubborn is an entirely different question to whether or not, standalone, it’s a good game, because surprisingly… it is. Level by level, checkpoint to checkpoint, the game provides us with a thinking-man’s shooter. A place where reflexes and accuracy take a back seat to tactical decision-making and an atmosphere with the consistency of butter. This experience is provided to you for a penny under 50 quid with one major caveat. That you haven’t played Vegas before.

When all of the various aspects of the gameplay, story, music and visuals come together, what you end up with is another ten or so hours to add to the first. But the problem is that the whole Vegas experience is not quite strong enough to last through a combined 20 hours almost entirely unchanged. So memorable was the first outing, that’s exactly how it felt. Almost like the year-long gap between playing this and its predecessor was diminished to mere minutes.

Vegas 2 occupies an untenable position. For those who played and loved its debut, this simply isn’t as good, so there’s very little reason here to splash your cash on this sequel. And for those of you who haven’t played Vegas, you can snap it up now for the price of a round of lagers and that is most definitely where you should start. It is a good game, but the house of good and bad is built upon the more basic foundation of whether or not there is any actual purpose to a game’s very existence. Vegas 2 is on very shaky ground.

Dan Howdle