Not quite a pot of gold

by ERIK LEIJON

With Ubisoft’s recent acquisition of Tom Clancy’s name and properties—Mr. Clancy will no longer collect a royalty cheque when Ubisoft releases something bearing his name—I started thinking about the long-term viability of the Clancy franchises: mainly Splinter Cell, Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon. Financially speaking, it seems like a good deal for Ubisoft, who can now exploit the author’s name with cross-media spin-offs (the first movies and books could position Ubisoft as a small media empire).

The thing is, the gaming industry has quick turnover, and sometimes one botched sequel is enough to send the money train off the tracks. Ubisoft Montreal’s latest, Rainbow Six Vegas 2 (X360, PS3/Ubisoft, Ubisoft Montreal), is not that sequel—in fact, it’s quite enjoyable—but arguably not as good as the first Vegas and not a great example of Ubisoft Montreal’s desire to create engaging characters and storylines.

Rainbow Six is a squad-based tactical first-person shooter, where the three-man SWAT team you command must perform elaborate raids on heavily fortified enemy locations. The series is notable for being more realistic than most, since players can only take one or two shots before dying. Vegas 2 is essentially a concurrent storyline to the first Vegas (also developed by the Montreal studio), with a different main character navigating around Sin City and a few other locations before, during and after the events of the 2006 original.

There was much consternation among hardcore fans (well, the real hardcore fans left the series years ago, when Ubisoft made the highly technical series more console friendly) that the story mode can now only be played by two players.

During a visit with the developers last month, they explained it was necessary to reduce the previous number of players from four because they wanted more cutscenes to advance the story. Sadly, the story remains your typical run-of-the-mill kill-the-coloured-man-who-has-a-bomb script mixed in with a Shyamalanian twist and badass leader who loves spouting about the morality of the job.

All the Tom Clancy adaptations are nothing more than action-movie catchphrases in a simpleton CSI procedural format. The dialogue is mostly limited to helicopter small talk with your SWAT team. There’s a successful terrorist attack early on, and the characters wrestle with this afterwards, but the scene doesn’t really show what happened beyond noxious gas creeping through a door crack.

Gameplay-wise, the series has made some great adjustments, especially the dummy-proof ACES system of level building. Players can now gain experience in three categories: marksmanship, close-quarter shooting and assault (which rewards shooting through an enemy’s defences). Best of all, the experience points are transferable across the single-player and multiplayer modes. There’s a small gift for those who have a game save of the original on their hard drive for the 360 version. Strangely enough, very little of the game takes place in the glamorous parts of Vegas. There’s a scene in an empty strip joint, but it would have been nice if the team had created their own wacky and elaborate casino designs.

Of both R6 Vegas games, the pinnacle remains the early mission in the first where the team is engaging in promenade warfare on Fremont Street, under the gaudy lights of Glitter Gulch. It’s the singular moment where Ubisoft Montreal captured the allure of Vegas, the intensity of modern warfare and the concept of terrorists attacking an American target in one jarring scene. Ubisoft has big plans for the Clancy name, and they risk rolling a snake eyes if they don’t provide a strong storyline to entice fans to keep coming back.