It’s almost hard to believe that my college friends and I have been playing games in this franchise for about ten years (we began playing our freshman year—and yes, Rainbow Six was the first game in the series, despite the contention by one guy on our floor that it had been proceeded by Rainbow 1-5). We’ve played almost every game in the series and we were heavily anticipating Vegas 2, after a recent renewed interest in the first Vegas installment.

Imagine then, if you will, our crushing disappointment upon popping the disc in and discovering that Vegas 2 eliminated our favorite part of the game: four player cooperative story mode. Allow me to assure you, Ubisoft, that I have do more than one friend with whom I want to play co-op, thank you. With four players, you can still fill a map with terrorists and fight your way through them, but you don’t get to experience the story and you don’t get the challenge of other gameplay styles—bomb defusing, hostage rescue, etc.

Options have been dialed down in the terrorist hunt mode, as well: you can’t change the number of respawns, as you could in the original Vegas, and there are only about eleven maps available, many of them rehashes from previous games, including Vegas and several that date back to 2003′s Raven Shield. It’s also perplexing that Vegas 2 continues in the annoying tradition of not letting two players on the same Xbox join a single multiplayer match (Halo 3, in my opinion, still holds the gold standard on multiplayer; not only does it allow that feature, but it also has the aforementioned four player co-op). I’m currently still playing through Vegas 2‘s co-op story mode with the allowed one friend (instead of allowing me to invite my two other friends, it saddles me with a pair of annoying AI teammates who appear to be special forces equivalent of Abbott and Costello), hence my dubbing this a “review.”

It’s worthwhile to point out that there are some good changes to the game as well. For example, it’s easier to progress through Vegas 2‘s ranking system without having to play adversarial matches online. And here you are rewarded for playing with others: you get points for your teammates’ actions as well as your own. Plus, the new ACES system, which breaks experience down into three tracks (Marksmanship, Close Quarters Battle, Assault) makes it far more transparent in terms of show what nets you experience, though I’ve found that it’s sometimes distracting to think “Man, I really need to kill this guy with a grenade so I can get to the next Assault level.” Another strange effect of the game: since headshots net you only one point of Marksmanship, as opposed to the +3 you get from a long-range kill, it’s actually encouraged me not to go for headshots. Which, when you think about it, isn’t necessarily very beneficial in the efficiency/realism department.

One thing that occurred to me as I was playing through the game, though, is a profound shift in the franchise. Early games in the series gave a lot of weigh to the tactical part of the game: there used to be an extensive planning phase in which you would meticulously lay out your team’s path through a level, assigning waypoints and actions. This has been replaced with on-the-fly commands to your team in more recent games. In some ways I feel the franchise’s focus has been gradually changing over time from “simulation” to “game.” I’m not sure if that’s good or bad, but I know that I don’t necessarily want to see Rainbow Six become just another tactical shooter. I hope the next edition in the series (which the developers have stated will leave Sin City far behind) returns to some of the features that made the game so great in the first place.