So, Khidr and I just finished completing the single player campaign in Rainbow Six Vegas 2 cooperatively. We’ve touched on it before in previous posts, but co-op is an extremely important part of why I love multiplayer gaming, and weighs in fairly heavily when considering whether a game should be rented, bought, or passed-over completely. (Too Human broke our heart by not following Ozymandias’ Co-op Bil of Rights‘ first tenant: All co-op games should allow players to play cooperatively through the rich, single-player experience. Doing so through suspension of disbelief (ie, when cinematics refer to only a single player) is ok, though not ideal. Jerks.)
First off, a few things this game did right:
- The aforementioned adherence to allowing both players to experience the “cinematics” of the game, however disgustingly lame they were.
- The excellent formula established by the first R6V title and its predecessors; namely, the riveting tactical shooter experience. No other game I’ve played (outside of other Rainbow Six FPS titles, that is) has captured the intensity of waves of terrorists needing to be cleared out of a particular location. Despite the lashing this game is about to get, I still felt the palpable enjoyment of popping hot lead into evildoers’ heads in calculated bursts of artillery. I attribute this to some great core mechanics that weren’t changed from the first title along with some inspired level design.
- The Persistent Elite Creation system has been updated to track your progress in both single player and mutliplayer (wonderful touch). It also is set up (a la Oblivion) to reward you for the type of play you exhibit the most, so you will receive experience points for CQC if you are lighting up fools at close range with shotguns, and those experience points will lead you to better and better shotguns.
And, uh…that’s it for the good stuff. On to the canings, then.
- This game is broken. The game locked up independantly for both Khidr and myself a total of three times through the campaign. Unacceptable, plain and simple.
- I should use the term “campaign” somewhat loosely. The cinematics I alluded to earlier were usually nothing more than a terribly rendered mini-video in the top-right corner of your HUD popping up from time-to-time. This is NOT the only way to maintain a first-person perspective and deliver a great narrative (CoD4 much?) And then there’s the yap-yap. My God, these people don’t shut up. And they are so very excited to deliver their terribly-acted lines that they talk over one another. Add to this a horrible mixing system where the main character is quieter than the squabbling going on around you and it’s a hapless mess. I still have no idea why we were chasing these people, or what the hell happened at all.
- They added the nifty feature of being able to add your real face to the game via the Xbox Live Vision camera. Fantastic. First off, after taking a head-on and profile shot of you, it starts…processing. And…processing. You end up having to sit there for several minutes while your console feigns death (not a funny joke in these times of RRoDs and waning warranties, and even scarier with the radical instability of the game itself). More frustrating is that after all of that waiting, one or both of your pictures might not be good enough (thanks for telling me early…), and you’ll be asked to retake it. Ug. The likeness it produces is not terrible (unless you happen to be ugly), but I’d like to believe that a more high-quality picture could be taken, and then the process of mapping a few points on the face manually would probably produce a better likeness and speed the whole process up (or at least make it feel like it took less time due to audience participation). Adding to the lameness is spotty networking and code that would forget to load Khidr’s face in at the beginning of matches and a total lack of lip syncing with custom faces. Just don’t bother, guys.
- This bitch is ugly. While the level design is great, the actual graphical content is just screaming original Xbox era, both in terms of geometry and texturing. It’s sad that the only things that don’t suffer from low-res textures are the overbearing ads for Comcast and Far Cry 2, and strangely telling. And on top of this heart-wrenching state of affairs, this steaming pile has the stones to have framerate hitches from time-to-time. Yeah. Do that.
- Then there is a general amount of what can only be described as “wonkiness” with the physics and collision detection of objects in the world. On a few occasions, Khidr and I would phase directly through objects or floated above staircases as we sneaked around this world.
***SPOILER*** Highlight below to see gripe with the ending.
- VERY strange ending to it all with a big boss battle against a helicoptor. For a game that (despite the inconsistencies with the engine) touts all kinds of realism in tactical combat, you have to gun down a helicoptor with your regular tactical weapons. It takes hits like a big boss from the Nintendo era, and dies like one. Huh?
Overall, both Khidr and myself agree that this would’ve been just fine as a $10 or $15 expansion pack (the whole thing feels rather like a mission pack), but $60 is total usury, and they should be embarrassed for phoning in a poorly-implemented Unreal 2.5-engined mess such as this.
Two tangos way down, folks.
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