Rather than doing a typical game review, I'd like to, if I may, simply rant about Rainbow Six: Vegas 2.

Firstly, the R6 series (not the robots from Star Wars) has always been known for its shitty A.I. Well, shitty isn't the word, massively cheating A.I. It can kill you from 500 metres with a fucking http://world.guns.ru/smg/smg26-e.htm (skorpion), it can one shot you with a pistol while coming around a corner, through a door, because you nudged a wall and made noise. It can tell when you're reloading, when you're moving away from a door, and so on. It also, however, manages to make your teammates absolutely pants-on-head moronic. How hard is it to stand on either side of a door, and shoot anyone who comes through? Apparently, impossibly hard, as I, last night, watched them let six people through. Literally, just waltzing past them. They also will stand there and guard a wall, constantly. if there's a hallway than ends in a stairwell, they will face the wall, looking away from the stairwell.

These problems don't even mention the 'get stuck on a car bumper, making you reload a level' or 'getting stuck on a puddle.' If there's a way the A.I. can break, it will.

Moving past that, the gun selection confuses me somewhat. Rainbow Six is known for having a veritable fucktonne of weaponry. I think Raven Shield had something like 15 Assault Rifles alone. The new one has a fair amount of weapons, yes, but they all feel exactly the same. Now, obviously assault rifles don't differ hugely in how they kill (aim at guy clipping through wall, shoot him, he screams a ten minute dead scream despite your 7.62 NATO round that just pierced his larynx), but they did feel different in past games. Other than look, the Assault Rifles especially, work almost exactly the same.

The A.C.E.S. system is an interesting idea, where you unlock new weapons, the Shield, different gear sets, new camo, etc, by killing people in certain ways. I really like the idea, but at a certain point you have to stop headshotting people in order to advance other areas. So basically it comes to the point where headshots are detrimental to further unlocks, which is a bizarre counter-intuitive way of dealing with it. For example, if you shoot someone through cover, it's an Assault kill. If you headshot them though, it's a Marksman kill. Killing someone who has a shield is an Assault kill.. unless you headshot them. It's just very weird.

Also, there seems to be some problem with the animations at times. For example, the A.I. will occasionally rappel down towards you (usually to their doom). Sometimes, when they do so, they basically teleport down. They just appear at the top, then they're on the ground. It's very bizarre. Enemies will be staring 180 degrees away from you, and the second you move towards them they have turned all the way around and are hitting you. It not only looks bizarre, but can be quite irritating.

When I foolishly tried multiplayer the first time, I ran into an interesting phenomenon. I went to plug in the internet for my free month of Live.. Gold or whatever, and I thought to myself "there's some reason I don't do this. Something that makes me regret going onto Live..." but I couldn't remember what it was. Ten seconds into my first game, a 12 year old boy is screaming at me to "gbbshh tob booshcabe!" He's yelling so loudly the headset barely registers it as sound. It's just static and half vowels. I slowly learned he was complaining about the fact I had a briefcase, and wasn't sprinting for the cap point. Had I my own headset (I couldn't find mine) I would have told him to take the fucking lead, as I wasn't doing it alone. I found him again, later, presumably on the same server. This time I heard the words "FAMAS" (which I was using), "grenades" which everyone was using, and "Headshots" which I was getting a lot of. In the end, I was kicked out of four of the five servers I joined, for reasons that are not entire clear.

I've mentioned my problems with the single player story in other posts, but basically the story is awful, the ending is terrible, and you never care about anyone.

G "Blackhat" E; "Lima, Oscar, Lima!"