Where Rainbow Six Vegas 2 fails to innovate in single player, it makes up for with a strong online pacakge
Cons: Campaign is too similar to the first and all the less remarkable for it; Story is weak
In the real world terrorists (or for that matter, anyone with bullets and an intention to harm) are dangerous things. Historically the Rainbow Six series has stuck by this idea, forcing you to use your wits to outmaneuver the terrorists rather than run in Rambo style like in many other games. However, when Rainbow Six Vegas first came out, it polarized fans by making the game more accessible and fast-paced with features such as regenerating health and a cover system, but also including a far more expansive multiplayer mode that trumped past entries. Rainbow Six Vegas 2 is an extension of these ideas and certainly won't win those discouraged players back, but for everyone else, it's hard to imagine a better online tactical shooter.
Rainbow Six Vegas ended in a disappointing cliffhanger, and Rainbow Six Vegas 2 certainly tries to answer any questions leftover by the plot, but unfortunately it just keeps the story muddled and confusing the whole time. The main concern you should have is that there are terrorists and you need to kill them and save the civilians.
Here's the thing: even with regenerating health you can only take a few bullets before kicking the Nevada dust. Thus you will find most of your action spend carefully taking cover and ordering your teammates (whether via a button press or headsets if you play co-op) into advantageous positions to ensure survival. Although the controls take a bit of getting used to (they are a tad bit unorthodox), once you get a grasp, you will find that tactics are fast and easy, with the sprint function further speeding up the gameplay.
But most of that already applied to the first game, and certainly that's where the game's biggest fault lies: it doesn't innovate. The biggest features to the campaign are the sprint and the extension of the PEC system, neither of which dramatically alters the campaign, rendering it fairly unmemorable in the end (although a few key sequences such as the college level and strong enemy AI certainly make the campaign worth a play through).
In the first Rainbow Six Vegas you were able to customize your multiplayer persona's appearance, weapons, armor, etc. and a ranking system would keep you hooked for a while. In this game the unlockable nature of this system has been upgraded and applied to single player. Besides ranks, there is now an ACES system which adds points to three skill areas depending on how you kill enemies (ex: kill an enemy at close range adds to the CQB section while using a grenade adds to the assault category).
The same features carry over to the game's fantastic multiplayer modes. Rainbow Six Vegas 2 takes the same action from the campaign (minus ordering your teammates) and applies it to several well-designed maps across several modes. Everything is carefully balanced and every map supports every mode (whether you want to play standard Team Deathmatch, a Counter-Strike-esque Search and Destroy variant, or the innovative twist on VIP, you can play on any map). The game also kept the enjoyable Terrorist Hunt mode from the first game (where you took out large groups of terrorists on the multiplayer maps) adding even more replay value to a bulky package.
Across the board the presentation is pretty good, although admittedly one would expect more from the Unreal Engine, particularly with past experience. Nonetheless the weapons look great and everything is pretty well-detailed. The sound design is also pretty good with great gunshots, but not a whole lot else.
Forming a single cohesive opinion on this game is a little tricky. On the one hand the campaign, while fun, does nothing truly new, nor does it make any large improvements over the first one (not that it needed to). Yet on the other hand, the multiplayer portion of the game has been upgraded and fine-tuned to become what is surely one of the best online games for the system. What's left is a product that every online shooter fan should own, but everyone without internet connection could probably ignore or rent.