Tom Clancy has his name attached to quite a few video games but were it not for this 1001 blog, I don't know if I'd have ever played very many of them. Splinter Cell was obviously a big hit, but I was more into Metal Gear, and the other series often came across as games that you'd like far more if you were the type of person who read a lot of Tom Clancy books.
There's nothing wrong with that - I guess you know what you're getting into - but the games were generally the kind where you need to be invested in that world and setting to enjoy what otherwise seemed to be a bit of a generic shooter of some description.
Will Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 show me the error of my ways? That Tom Clancy titles can be just as impressive as any other shooter, even without the Hollywood setpieces? Let's outfit and find out.
Frustrations
If there's one thing you need to appreciate a Tom Clancy story, it's words. Whether it be printed in a book or displayed on a screen, you need words to know what the heck is going on, and Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 doesn't have them.
The loading screen gives you a paragraph without context, and the menus provide no subtitles for you to know who is who and what they're doing. I guess we'll just have to pay attention, which will of course be tricky when we don't know the controls to this tactical first-person shooter.
Either this level serves as a tutorial level or the hints are very generous, as room by room we learn more and more about what we'll be getting up to through this game.
We're in command of a small squad of two other highly specialised (I hope) soldiers of some sort, infiltrating wherever this place is in search of whatever we're here for. Like I say, paying attention without subtitles is mighty difficult.
Initially, you might think the controls are too weird to be useable. Right-clicking the mouse will see you hug the wall in cover, and the spacebar prompts your squad into position before yet more letter keys have them pull off a variety of context-sensitive tasks.
You have such a degree of control that you can position your AI teammates at a door and tell them to sweep and clear the room behind it, all while you hide in cover further back down the corridor. You won't get to see the action, and won't get as much XP from it as you would doing it yourself, but you learn pretty early on that you can sort of do two things at once, and in an easier to use interface than SWAT 4, for example.
Fun Times
Repelling, using thermal sights through smoke grenades, disarming small traps, you and your squad can do it all, even if it looks a little wonky and cumbersome in your first few minutes of getting to grips with it all.
I've not yet understood what the difference between a few of the keys are and why they're used to bust into rooms when other tool-tip indicated keys are not, but I soon work out it has something to do with some icons on the HUD. Learn what they are, press the associated key for the space they're in, and away we go, hurling grenades and flash banging our way through the complex, room by room.
In not much time at all, we've worked our way around to where we need to be, waiting for another team to arrive before we carry on the mission. Whatever the mission is...
Someone - perhaps even my own character, without me telling him to - breaks the order to remain quiet and patient and all Hell breaks loose. This hostage situation just got violent, and the game prompts us to tell our squad that, yes, you are definitely allowed to go loud, both in terms of being able to take off your silencer, presumably for better weapon performance, and to shoot on sight rather than waiting to be shot at, and you can switch between these types of stances whenever you like.
Further Frustrations
I'm playing on Normal difficulty, and it appears to be one shot, one kill. You will likely never know where you got shot from and will have to hope that the nearest checkpoint is favourable to you, otherwise, you're going through everything again, scripted scenes and all.
Hostages and game protagonist alive, the next room holds a checkpoint and a couple of outfitting boxes, creates full of the gear that you've unlocked through successful engagements and lots of killed combatants.
Seeing as we're going loud and I die to a single bullet, I put all the armour on, making my movement slower but my protection immense, and swap weapons for something that packs a little more punch and proceed to head into the ominously titled 'Ambush' section of the chapter.
I really want to like Rainbow Six: Vegas 2, but taking a step forward and dying isn't exactly my idea of fun. Still, I'm determined and have AI buddies to test the waters for me.
Tactics mostly went out of the window here, try as the tool-tips did to get me to blind fire from cover and tell my squad to lob some grenades. We got through it, though, somehow. There's definitely a system of health in place somewhere, as the screen will go low-res and blurry when you do come close to an early demise, but that just doesn't apply if the shot is going to kill you, for obvious reasons.
Our final objective marker points us to a bomb, and luckily for me, it is diffused by pointing at it and telling one of my squad to disarm it. Unfortunately for me and him, he gets shot and we get ambushed again.
I don't know who this bomb belongs to or why it is here. I can't even be sure if this is all an elaborate training exercise. All I can do is think back to what has happened up to this point and wonder what tools I have that can help me out.
I lob a smoke grenade to provide some cover, slap on my thermal goggles, get ready to save my teammate, only to see Alpha squad burst through the door and end the mission.
Your efforts are rewarded with new gear for you to use in future missions, and I'm guessing improving your skills with headshots and other efficient means of threat disposal will unlock some stats, maybe? I'm not entirely sure. There's definitely a system of some sort going on, which sort of prompts you to doing as much as you can, without relying on your squad.
I'm not too fussed right now. I'm just going to play Vegas 2 for what it seems to be - a polished tactical FPS where I have absolutely no knowledge of why I'm doing the things I'm doing.
Case in point, other than for the fact that we're in Las Vegas, I could not for the life of me tell you why we're in a casino here. So far as I'm aware, we're looking for a guy who makes bombs, who is now dead, so we're looking for his warehouse.
Are all these guys working for him? Are they in competition? I've no idea. I'm just killing folks because they are in a level to be killed, and that's quite alarming if we think about it.
All of this continues to fall under a frustration heading for the five or so deaths I've cut out. Each one lead to new insights about what you could do, not only in terms of new ways to approach the level but new timing windows for meeting enemy patrols and the like.
Trial and error is not a favourite method of mine, and Vegas 2 does make me want to shout and drop the difficulty, where I expect to be killed in two hits, but I stuck with it. I was having a good time controlling this squad and seeing what I could do with them.
We made it to the garage where we were ambushed and killed for the umpteenth time, and I knew I'd seen enough for one sitting.
Final Word
In an hour of gameplay, I probably made it through twenty to thirty minutes worth of actual story, not that I could tell you even the slightest thing about it, including my own name and who I work for, but Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 was impressing me with the relative ease at which it controlled.
I want to poke my nose back into SWAT 4 because the idea of instructing a squad on the fly is appealing, but the problem I have with that game is that I'm clumsy and inept at the controls and don't know how to handcuff a screaming old woman.
I similarly want to return to Rainbow Six: Vegas 2, but I feel I wouldn't get much out of playing it just for the sake of playing it. There's a Tom Clancy story, or Tom Clancy inspired story, at least, attached to this game, but I have literally no way of following along with it.
Radio chatter at the start of a mission gives no context, interruptions mid-mission are often ignored because I'm struggling with the mission itself. Maybe there's a menu screen with some info on it, but to pause the game just to find out who it is I'm supposed to be killing still doesn't tell me anything about the reason why.
Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 is a pretty good experience, otherwise. If you only care about the gameplay, there's even a mode where you're just dumped into a level with a ton of enemies and told to deal with it, where you can rank up your stats to unlock more stuff for use in the game itself, if I recall correctly.
There are systems at play here that work. Whether they work brilliantly or could still be tweaked is a question for fans to answer - I'm just not that skilled to know - but they've certainly caught my attention.
I just wish I could find some subtitles.
Fun Facts
Ubisoft patched the game to check for illegal copies by seeing if there was a disc in the drive while playing. Unfortunately for them, this stopped players who bought digital copies from playing the game, so they patched again to remove the check, which is when someone noticed that the old patch was itself using a No-CD crack from a pirated games group to make those checks in the first place.
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas 2, developed by Ubisoft Montreal, first released in 2008.
Version played: PC, 2008.