Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction

In one recurring mission in Rainbow Six Extraction, your Special Ops veteran is transported into a hellish parallel dimension where they face off against a malignant, mutated facsimile of one of your fellow Operators from the Rainbow Six Siege cast. An armored, multi-tiered health bar appears across the top of the screen, and it depletes as you dump clip after clip of ammunition into their scaly carapace. It is a cosmic, apocalyptic boss fight, and it’s hard not to think about just how far this series has strayed from its once-dogmatic faithfulness to gritty Navy SEAL realism. In Extraction, Ubisoft successfully brings the series to its wildest frontiers yet, but while this high-stakes co-op creates thrills out of the gate, it doesn’t seem to have the same staying power as its competitive cousin.

Extraction does make a meek attempt to justify its science fiction: There are some short cutscenes hovering around the margins and an unwieldy codex overflowing with flavor text that explain the massive onyx obelisks that protrude from the ground all over the globe. Some are the size of skyscrapers — one impaling the Statue of Liberty — and they’ve unleashed a band of zombified parasitic aberrations annoyingly dubbed the “Archæans,” which were first introduced in the 2018 Outbreak limited-time event in Siege. Those same heroes have been deployed to hold the line, and as a party of three, a party of two, or by yourself, you delve deep into the fetid underbelly of this grotesque insurgency. It is pure pulp – body horror blended with steely tactics – and as someone with an appreciation for Rainbow Six’s sillier side (like its two trips to Las Vegas) I relished the chance to steep into this bizarre new world without asking too many questions.

So yes, Extraction is very much a traditional co-op shooter augmented by the sublime mechanics Ubisoft mastered in the ever-popular Siege. Stealth is key; you slither through the muck with your two friends, hoping to take down the demons in silence in order to avoid unleashing the latent mob lingering behind every corner. From a game design perspective, this is a no-brainer: Extraction is a chance to enjoy Siege’s one-of-a-kind gunplay in a slower-paced environment than the mother game’s madcap competitive matches. Siege lets you annihilate targets with surgical precision: you can score headshots from across the map through plaster walls, or locate a target by the mere sound of their footsteps. But Siege has also cultivated a fully calcified playerbase who’ve obsessed over it for seven years, and jumping into matchmaking as a less-experienced player often feels like walking into a buzzsaw. Extraction, on the other hand, lets us play with those shooting mechanics while aiming at dumber, slower NPCs. We can indulge in the euphoria more than ever.

In fact, Extraction often resembles an elaborate expansion to Siege – in another world, this could have easily been presented as a generous DLC pack. All of the Operators you and your friends can choose from are directly imported from Siege, right down to their special abilities and character models. The in-game geometry is tight and compact like a 5v5 map, which is a departure from the elaborate, cross-country treks demanded by games like Back 4 Blood and Left 4 Dead. In fact, everything from the art design to the gun models bear an uncanny kinship to the formula Ubisoft laid out in 2015.