Persistence on and offline
Now dropping back to the co-op mode, you’ve still got two player co-op which is at its very best over system link as you and your buddy can be in the same room. Sure, it’ll work fine over Xbox LIVE using a headset but it’s a damn sight easier if you can point to each others’ screens for entry points etc. Yes, I know it’s cheating but you really do start to work as team.In the game itself, you can see that Ubisoft have spent a lot of time on how you move around and interact with the world. The cover system in particular has seen a mass of work and is now pretty intuitive. There’s none of this Gears of War ‘auto-cover’ stuff… you hold down the left trigger and run up to a wall to take cover. Keep holding that trigger to stay in cover and use the left stick to shuffle along the wall to the edge before peeking around. You can be a chicken and blind fire around corners or over your head, or you can enter the aim-mode and take a bead on a bad guy whilst exposing as little of yourself as possible.
And this is where team work comes in. Mike was doing the cover and aimed shot stuff and, unusually for him, missed. Of course, the AI terrorists don’t take too kindly to being shot at and so Mike came in for some accurate return fire. He took a hit and ducked back behind the wall but now the terrorist was focusing on him it gave me a chance to pop out from my hiding place and pop off a couple of shots… scratch one bad guy.
The point of all this was it was easy to do. Dropping into cover, using the cover, aiming around corners or just having a peek were all simple to execute and, even for a ten thumbed joypad idiot like me, it only took one run-through of the system to have it down and sorted. Pretty soon I was taking cover at every corner, easing around to have a look and occasionally dropping the unwary bad guys that I saw.
The ‘A’ button is your context sensitive button for most actions in Rainbow Six Vegas 2, which also keeps things nice and simple. Want to use the snake camera? Approach the door , look at the base of the door and hit A. Want to open the door? Hit A. Want to rappel down a rope, lower yourself down a bit then flip upside down to look in the window? Hit A… twice. Easy.
And that’s where Rainbow Six Vegas 2 has seen a lot of work on tweaking from the original Rainbow Six Vegas. Doing everything is much easier. But speaking of ‘ease’, the difficulty has taken a ramping up. So ‘easy’ in Rainbow Six Vegas 2 is equivalent to ‘normal’ in Rainbow Six Vegas; everything has jumped up a level. And I’m glad Ubisoft have ramped it up as the interface is now so much easier that I spent far less time arguing with the controls than I used to, so I know I’d have found ‘easy’, if it had been left as it was, too easy.
