I’m sitting here doing my taxes while Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 grinds itself endlessly, through a stunning combination of my own genius and the designer’s laziness, for XP points. I’m noticeably annoyed by the fact that in order to unlock decent colors and clothing for your avatar, you have to hunker down and shoot four hundred billion terrorists in the face. The whole rewards system in this series reminds me of pretty much every single korean MMO I've been forgiving enough to try - encouraging people to play for months and months by making the starting character look like a another faceless AI grunt seems like a big step back for profitability’s sake, even for Ubisoft. There are slightly less obnoxious ways to encourage replayability than this mindless slogging bullshit.
I’m sticking with it mostly out of love for Gears of War's majestically fluid cover and blind-fire systems, both having been copied here about as well as can be expected, considering the crushingly methodical pace of RS. Multiplayer's got four-player online co-op, too, so it’s not like there isn’t a good game here, it’s just buried under heaps of forced, generic business-minded changes. It screams cash-in, and it’s amazing to me how half-assing a few extra levels and adding needlessly time-consuming challenges can ruin even a fundamentally satisfying system like the one they’ve got here.
