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.

I’D LIKE THE PREQUEL-SEQUEL DOUBLE COMBO, PLEASE

This year’s edition is set in Vegas again, however, as hinted by the last game’s cliffhanging season finale–style ending. Sidekicks Michael Walter and Jung Park will once again be by your side, but you won’t be issuing them orders as Logan Keller. Instead, you’ll strap on the bulletproof vest of Bishop, an elite operative with a flawless record who skyrocketed through the Rainbow ranks.

In an interesting “for the ladies” twist, Montreal is going the Deus Ex: Invisible War route of letting you play as either a male or female character. (Don’t expect any Mass Effect all-lady kissing scenes, however.) And either gender is fully customizable, right down to your face and gear. So if you want, you can do what designer Philippe Therien did during our demo: create a tanktop-wearing, handlebar-mustachioed stud in wraparound sunglasses that he described as “Colin Farrell as a Chippendale in The Matrix. Um, yeah...

Anyway, these decisions weren’t made just to appease the Frag Dolls. The Montreal team wants you to get invested in your character because, as Johalem told us: “The story is the game. We want you to see the story have its effect on the characters.” Furthermore, he added, every cutscene will be an interactive one through your eyes, à la Half-Life. “We want the player to face all of the moral and physical struggles that real [elite operatives] face.”

Further tightening the narrative is something that must be an Xbox first: uniquely, Vegas 2 is actually part sequel and part prequel. The action will begin before the events of Rainbow Six Vegas. From there, it’ll run in parallel to when Logan was in Mexico during Vegas’ early levels, and then run concurrently with his casino-crawling exploits. It’ll conclude after the dam’s events in the closing moments of the first game. Johalem mentioned that this fajita-wrap of a plot was done in part because 2008 will mark the 10-year-anniversary of the Rainbow Six franchise.

THE GLITZ, THE GLAMOUR, THE SUNLIGHT

Though most of the first Vegas took place during primetime terrorist hours (that’d be between sundown and sunup), Vegas 2 will make much more generous use of the burning ball of fi re in the sky that most Las Vegans duck into casinos to avoid. Yes, that means your counter-terrorism tour of Sin City will take you out of the neon-lit casino floors and around the rest of Vegas. Expect to shoot it out with the bad guys in residential areas of one of America’s fastest-growing cities; in its streets and back alleys; in its night clubs; in the Las Vegas Convention Center; and, Johalem hinted, outside the city limits entirely.

“It’s more CSI’s Las Vegas than the glamorous Las Vegas this time around,” suggests single-player design lead Patrick Plourde. Technologically, then, Vegas 2 faces different challenges than the first game, where the locales were tight and shrouded in darkness or artificial hues. Plourde admitted that, while the team was proud of what they accomplished with Vegas’ visuals, they were learning the Unreal Engine 3 as they went. Now, he beamed proudly, they have the final code-drop from Epic (who just finished the technology for Unreal Tournament III and thus distributed the latest version to all UE3 licensees). Plourde pointed out Vegas 2’s improved lighting and better shadows, and then noted that optimizations the team was forced to make so Vegas would run well on the PlayStation 3 and its lesser memory complement are now benefiting 360 owners in the form of performance increases — i.e., a smoother framerate — for Vegas 2.

Best of all, “the graphics look really good even in multiplayer,” he says with a smile, addressing one of gamers’ biggest complaints about the original Vegas.

FEELING EXTRA-PERSISTENT

As you’d probably expect from Ubisoft’s most popular and enduring online series, the multiplayer aspect of Vegas 2 is getting far more than just a fresh coat of paint. The Persistent Elite Creation (P.E.C.) mode of course returns, and it’s much deeper. In addition to the obvious stuff, the P.E.C. is evolving in a way you probably wouldn’t expect: it’s carrying over to the single-player campaign.

In the same way scoring kills and accomplishing objectives nets you experience points in Call of Duty 4’s multiplayer mode, your actions also earn you rewards in Vegas 2’s solo play. Thanks to the new A.C.E.S. system, everything you do is tracked — including the method you use to do it. For example, if you equip your silencer and manage to take down a foe from afar without alerting his nearby buddy, you’ll earn extra points. These points will earn you new weapons and gear — and the team’s paid extra attention to the latter. “We didn’t really have proper military outfits [in Vegas],” Therien laments, and that limitation should be rectified for Vegas 2.

Other tweaks being made to the campaign include a sprint button (great for moving from cover to cover in one piece), the ability to quickly customize your load-out during the pre-mission helicopter flight, and bullet penetration. Yep, thin cover (like plywood and plaster walls) will no longer protect your targets.

FUN WITH A FRIEND

But it’s the changes to the P.E.C. mode that are most exciting because integrating it into the campaign means that your character advances no matter what you do, whether it’s playing on Xbox Live in a 16-player shootout or marching through the story by yourself. Those who choose to complete the campaign first won’t be starting from scratch, equipment-wise, when they venture onto Xbox Live, while the opposite is also true: multiplayer junkies will have plenty of toys and gear at their disposal when they choose to tackle terrorist scum in the storyline.

Perhaps best of all, however, is that the “one-character” experience applies to the revamped cooperative mode, which is playable via Xbox Live, System Link, or split screen. The campaign and the co-op are one-and-the-same now – the latter isn’t restricted to the Reader’s Digest version of the story the way Vegas was – so you and a friend will get the same experience playing together as you would gaming separately.

In Vegas 2, Player 2 will suit up as Knight, while players three and four will always be Walter and Jung (Player 1 — as the game host and as Bishop, the team leader — commands them). This setup allows you to have people in three places at once instead of the solo campaign’s two: you can be at one door, your friend can be at another, while you can order Jung and Walter to a third location. (Fear not: Vegas 2’s levels have been designed to accommodate this option.)

Cooler still is that, in new P.E.C. Mode tradition, you’ll earn experience points for objectives your human pal completes, and vice versa. Plus, the whole deal is “jump in, jump out,” meaning you can start a solo game, have a buddy jump in, and if he leaves, you can continue alone again from where the two of you left off.

JACKPOT!

Though we’re a little bit disappointed that Rainbow Six isn’t moving to a new, equally exotic location, another (bigger) part of us is thrilled to return to Sin City, as — expansion packs included — Vegas was far and away the best entry in the series since its Rainbow Six 3 Xbox debut. In fact, we’re all too happy to double-down at the blackjack table with Ubisoft Montreal — particularly if they keep hitting 21.