Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas 2

The other new mode, Demolition (see it on Eurogamer TV), will also be familiar to any fans of online shooters - it's essentially Counter-Strike's bombing mission. The attacking team picks up the bomb, and must choose whether to plant it at Site A or Site B; the defending team, of course, needs either to prevent the plant or defuse the bomb once it's planted. It's a straightforward mode, enhanced greatly by the addition of some nice, clear indicators for the position of the bomb and the bomb-planting sites on each player's HUD.

The final tweak to the multiplayer is the match-making system. The lobby has been tidied up a little bit, fitting in more information without getting too cluttered, while under the bonnet the match-making engine is now better at returning sensible results.

"We just made it a little less intolerant," says Therien. "It's going to look for features you change first, when hunting for a game, instead of coming up with an entire list of results that don't make much sense to start with. It's also internally going to look for opponents who make more sense for you, and it gives a little more flexibility to the search engine to come up with better results."

Popping Smoke

The big question for Vegas 2 isn't whether fans of the original will like it - that's almost a given. The game is a quintessential sequel - a new storyline, some obvious tweaking and some cool new features, but leaving unfixed all the things which were unbroken. "It's just more of the same good stuff," says Therien.

No, the big question here is whether Vegas 2 can bring new players into the fold. Therien certainly hopes so. "If you have never played Vegas before, you can start with Vegas 2 - it's got a beginning, and a very good ending," he says. "If you've never heard of Vegas before, you can still very much enjoy the game." However, there's still a question mark over whether Rainbow Six will ever be able to win over players from the likes of Counter-Strike or Call of Duty 4 - for whom Rainbow Six's slightly dated graphics are off-putting, and its realism and attention to detail are somewhat intimidating.

"We're hoping that we can communicate better that it is accessible to everybody," says Therien; "that you don't need to be an army officer to understand how the game works. That's a bit of the stigma that's been surrounding Rainbow Six for a long time. Vegas reached a lot of new people, but we're hoping that with Vegas 2 we can reach even more people, so that people can really enjoy a very good shooter."

Interestingly, though, this is also likely to be the series' last outing to Vegas. Despite the success of the game, there'll be no more "research" trips to Nevada's gambling dens for Ubisoft Montreal's Rainbow Six team.

"We will never go back to Vegas - at least, not in the foreseeable future," says Therien. "We really feel that the story of Vegas is done. We've explored as much of Vegas as we wanted. For now, we're pretty much covered with Vegas."

As to what the team will do next, Therien is cagier. "We haven't really thought about what we're going to do next," he claims. "We're just trying to finish this one right now, take a nice vacation and then we'll start thinking about it. The concept of being around one location was really good for Vegas, it really works - whether we'll do that again, I don't know right now."

So, Rainbow Six: Manhattan, perhaps? Rainbow Six: Los Angeles? Rainbow Six: Didcot? Who can say - all we know for now is that "it won't be in Vegas, that's for sure". Looks like the second helping may also be the last. Just as well that it's shaping up to be pretty tasty.