Rainbow 6 Vegas 2

In this, the imaginatively-named sequel to the popular counter-terrorist franchise originally penned in novel form by thriller/military writer Tom Clancy, Team Rainbow returns to Sin City to kick some terrorist ass, unravel a web of deceit and betrayal, and save the world in style.

The plot is thicker than before, with events in both this and the first game occurring simultaneously. While it’s an interesting idea, and adequately explains the absence of your teammates during certain missions, essentially what this boils down to is the return of those annoying pop-up windows that you don’t watch, due to there being so much happening on the screen that you simply can’t concentrate on (or hear) them.

Little new is added from the first outing, the most obvious addition being a customisable lead character. The ability to gain experience during combat, enabling you to level up, unlocking new clothes, camo and equipment as you go, seems like a good idea, but you get nowhere fast; it takes an age to get to the next rank, and unlocking three new shirts when you do so just doesn’t seem worth the effort.

With only a handful of new multiplayer maps and game modes, and blander, more identikit mission locations than the original, the developers have taken the fundamentals of the first game... and done nothing with them. It’s not a bad game, just more of the exact same. Rainbow fans will lap this up, whilst gamers looking for a fresher experience would do well to look elsewhere for the time being.