Review shoma 4/5 · May 3, 2024
Much like Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter from Ubisoft, Vegas and Vegas 2 are pretty similar, so I'll say this: the first Vegas game is not bad, but the sequel does everything better.
Unlike the Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 1 and 2, Vegas has just one version across Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. I think part of it is that GR:AW …
Much like Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter from Ubisoft, Vegas and Vegas 2 are pretty similar, so I'll say this: the first Vegas game is not bad, but the sequel does everything better.
Unlike the Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 1 and 2, Vegas has just one version across Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. I think part of it is that GR:AW ran on a proprietory engine, whereas Vegas uses Unreal Engine 3 which was probably much easier to port to PC. I've talked about Rainbow Six 3 and I thought it was a little too hardcore for my liking, although I respect what it did back in 2003.
So what is Rainbow Six? Before Vegas came along, the basic jist was that you controlled several squads of special forces soldiers armed with different weapons according to the situation. The objective was often to free hostages and/or to eliminate all the enemies. Before starting the mission you were able to see the whole level layout and you could give each squad a specific set of orders, where to go, which door to go in, what grenade to use when breaching it, etc. As such, the difficulty came from correctly building a perfect sequence of orders that would have you complete the mission and lose the least amount of operatives. Both you, controlling a soldier in real time and your teammates were very easy to kill, so the plan had to be perfect. The AI did not have much free will and followed the orders strictly. They weren't able to quickly decide on the fly that a when fired upon, they have to return fire and use a grenade to kill the opponent or, say, flee.
Xbox 360 and PS3 arrive and with them, a new generation of shooters headlined by Gears of War and an another Ubisoft military TPS, Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. Naturally, the next entry in the hardcore tactical FPS was to have a cover system. But whereas those games had a 100% over the shoulder camera, Rainbow Six Vegas still remained a first person game, but with the ability to take cover with the camera moving backwards to show the player and the surroundings from behind the cover.
Vegas does away with all of the pre-planning and simply gives you two squadmates and your trusty self. You can order your two guys to move somewhere, hold position, deploy grenades and breach doors in real time. They never split so you can only give them one order. It feels kind of like a waste, since having two soliders at your disposal to boss around is better than having them act as one, but I guess it made the game simpler. The levels mostly consist of rooms that can be assaulted from several doorways and the challenge is to properly give your teammates an instruction on how to enter the room, while simultaneously choosing a different point of entry to eliminate everyone that your grunts won't kill.
At a first glance this feels like a total downgrade but here's the thing. I don't know how but Ubisoft Montreal somehow had me being pinned down by enemies in a video game. Normally you don't care since there's no fear of death or injury in a video game, but here, somehow they got it through a combination of a low time to kill and enemies actually taking cover instead of rushing the player. So you quickly order your guys to throw a smoke grenade in your direction to obscure the enemies' vision and hide in the smoke while using thermal goggles to see through it and pick out everyone one by one.
I experienced such moments several times in Vegas 2 and I think it's one of the few shooters that has working AI partners that don't just act like bots. It was fascinating to see this at work and it totaly changed my perspective on the whole shift towards a more action-packed structure rather that the hardcore planning and punishing execution.
So this is Vegas 2. Don't think about the story, or the graphics, or anything else but this particular situtation because that's what's really interesting about this game. I give it 4 stars because of a very lame part of the game where you have to fight alone and also because it had a helicopter final boss fight which is just bad taste.
