A good game that is really underappreciated.
The first thing that you notice when you start playing Vegas 2 is that you immediately have to make a character that will be for both online of offline. In Vegas 2, you can earn experience for your character offline, as well as online, by either doing the story or terrorist hunts. This is something that should have been in the first game as well.
You now need less experience to reach the last level, elite. It now only takes 400,000 experience to reach the last level, which compared to the first game is very little. When ranking up, you do not unlock weapons anymore. In Vegas 2 you only get armors, camos, and clothing when you go up a rank. In order to get weapons, you now have something called A.C.E. skills, which after a certain amount of points, you unlock either a new weapon or you get an experience bonus. There are three different types of A.C.E.s: marksman, CQB, and assault. You raise the three individually, based on how you kill either terrorists or other people online.
The story in the game is just like any other Rainbow Six game: there's some bad guy that you have to kill. The story has some cool parts to it, such as when you hear hostages getting interrogated, but besides that, it seems really similar to the first Vegas, just in different places.
In Vegas 2, you can do co-op mode in the story however, which in a way is better and worse than the last game. It is better in the sense that the story is exactly the same in this game, unlike in the first Vegas where cutscenes were tooken away. Also, whoever is the first player gets to use the two teammates in the game during co-op, which can help when trying to be tactical. The bad part about the co-op though, is that before in the first Vegas, you could have four players in a team do the story mode. Now it is impossible to play the story in a group, like in the first game.
Besides the story, there is always the classic terrorist hunts in Vegas 2. There are two ways to do terrorist hunts: online with other players or offline by yourself or with the teammates. Before playing, you get the option to choose the difficulty, and in this game, the easier the difficulty the more lives you get when playing the game online. Besides having a few lives when playing online, a neat thing about the terrorist hunts in Vegas 2 is that you get experience for how many terrorists killed, and not for completing the mission (no more getting killed by the last terrorist and getting 0 exp).
Sadly, in this game, the terrorist seem to be godly at times. Often when playing, terrorist will spawn either in front of you or in a previously cleared room and kill you. At times it can get very aggravating.
The thing that saves this game however, is the multiplayer. In Vegas 2 you have two new multiplayer modes: team leader and total conquest. Team leader is kind of similar to assassination, a multiplayer mode in the first Vegas if you downloaded the extra maps, except it has a neat twist: there are two team leaders in both teams that can see where each other is at, and as long as the team leaders are alive, players on the team are allowed to spawn (unless you happen to get killed by the team leader). Once your team leader gets killed, your team cannot spawn however, which can sometimes make for quick, fun matches which neither team can win. The other mode, total conquest, is like conquest mode in the first Vegas, except this time around you have to hold all the satellites for 30 seconds in order to win. Games usually are short however, and more fast-paced with the new sprint button that allows you to run faster for a short amount of time in Vegas 2. Both of these new modes are quite fun, and when playing in even teams, can become quite challenging.
The online in this game is similar to the last Vegas, in that you can either host a room or join a room. There is no matchmaking, so in a way the games can be very laggy if you get unlucky and join a host with a bad connection, but in another way, it lets you have the freedom of choosing which map you want to play on, and know how full the room you are joining is. Once again, the host can do whatever he/she wants to do, and from time to time you will encounter a host that boots people due to them beating the host or stacks the teams to his/her favor. The lag in Vegas 2 however is quite better than the first Vegas, although when compared to games like Halo 3 or Call of Duty 4, it is still laggy.
Overall, Vegas 2 is a game, that is really good, but had so much hype that people expected too much out of it. The game is still one of the best tactical shooters available today, and any fan of tactical shooters should try the game.