Rainbow Six Vegas 2

Like the crumbling willpower of a gambling addict aching for just one more tug at a slot machine, Xbox’s venerable Rainbow Six series is hopping a plane back to Las Vegas for another rollercoaster romp down The Strip. It shouldn’t really be a surprise given how well last year’s iteration went over, and after all, it’s not like the decorated development team at Ubisoft’s Montreal studio is just churning out Tom Clancy’s Super Rainbow Six Hyper Gambling Problem II Turbo.

But what is a shock is just how soon Vegas 2 will land in your Xbox 360’s DVD tray: March. Yep, as in three months from now — that March. And after a visit to the team’s north-of-the-border headquarters, we uncovered a host of other new surprises as well…

ACCESS GRANTED

…Once we were able to get inside, that is. It turns out that the five-story former textile plant that Ubisoft Montreal calls home is something of an impenetrable fortress. It’s unassuming from the outside — there’s no indication that the old brick-façade structure is the birthplace of Splinter Cell and the current home of Prince of Persia, Assassin’s Creed, Rainbow Six, and most of Ubisoft’s other vital franchises. And for that reason, security is suffocatingly tight; you need a keycard for access to any door, prison-like turnstiles exist on every floor to ensure that just one person passes per card-swipe, and you even need your card to leave any area (so don’t even think of lending it to anyone). Even employees’ friends and family members aren’t permitted inside.

Perhaps it’s understandable given how many triple-A franchises live within the confines of these walls. In hindsight, it makes sense that we literally didn’t even know the name of the game we were seeing until we arrived on the Rainbow Six floor of the Montreal office. (Yes, one of the building’s five floors is dedicated entirely to its eldest Clancy series.) We were told it was the “next Rainbow Six,” of course, but until storywriter Jeffrey Johalem fired up a PowerPoint presentation in the Rainbow floor’s conference room (in case you’re wondering, it has a keycard lock on it, too), it could’ve been Rainbow Six Des Moines for all we knew.

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