I Will Never Play Siege Again

Image: Ubisoft/Twitch

Rainbow Half-dozen Extraction is all grind and no payoff

Like an RPG that just has side quests

By Jan 19, 2022, half dozen:01am EST

Playing Rainbow Six Extraction, Ubisoft's co-op vs. AI spinoff of its competitive tactical shooter Rainbow Six Siege, is similar playing all the worst parts of a very good game. The mechanics remain outstanding, but all the new content feels like an endless list of RPG side quests that feel destined to pb to something better merely never actually do.

In Extraction, players form squads of up to three to complete missions called Incursions, which can take place in twelve different areas and have iii random objectives every time you load into a new one. Each player selects an Operator and a loadout, and earns XP for their overall account and the specific Operator they're using.

Extraction brings dorsum many favorites from the Siege roster, including Smoke, Ela, Sledge, and Finka, to name a few, for a total of 18 playable Operators. The game as well includes a few other non-playable operators like Mira, Ash, and Thermite to assistance drag y'all through the cutscenes and missions, but they generally serve as a reminder that Siege's characters just aren't very mannerly.

This game is mortiferous serious, which is a real shame given that its ridiculous story could accept been fertile ground for goofiness. Extraction takes place in an alternating world where some of the United states of america' biggest cities (and also Alaska) are overrun by an alien race known as the Archæans and but a team of Rainbow Half-dozen operators can save the mean solar day.

Image: Ubisoft Montreal/Ubisoft

With a variety of fully-voiced Operators, Extraction might seem tailor-fabricated for in-game banter, simply there's none to speak of. Every moment of every mission is as silent every bit a crypt — unless, of course, a character is calling out their next tactical move, like shouting "reloading" for the 400th time in a mission. This bleak tone is more or less tolerable in the early stages of the game, but by 60 minutes 20 all I wanted was for someone to make i single joke after I killed alien number 1,159.

Putting the drab tone bated, at least the shooting feels bang-up. All of Extraction's underlying mechanics come up from Rainbow Vi Siege, and as far as realistic sim-lite shooting games get, information technology's about the all-time in that location is. Extraction has an armory of over a dozen guns, each of which has a unique boot and enough recoil to brand learning to control your spray an invaluable skill. It's a shame Ubisoft decided to go on Siege's weapon restrictions in place, withal, which means each Operator has a graphic symbol-specific arsenal that you lot can't mix and match.

Similar its source fabric, Extraction also looks incredible. Thin supporting walls get ripped with gunfire, sheetrock and concrete splinters wherever you shoot, and the creeping Sprawl, an alien-black goo that oozes across the ground and slows your movement, covers everywhere your bullets haven't touched. The levels themselves rarely feel unique, but they were solid enough that I was never frustrated to return again. Unfortunately, I can't say the aforementioned for the enemies within them.

To put it simply: Extraction's aliens are boring. Every surface area you enter during an Incursion has several spawning pods called Hives. Hives volition spawn Archæans if they're alerted and spread Sprawl across the ground. Along with the Hives, y'all've got various enemies like Grunts, which are basically zombies; Spitters, which shoot at you; Bashers, which hit you lot a bunch; and the occasional Apex, which spawns other enemies. There are nine other enemy variants, none of which are exciting enough to mention here.

Image: Ubisoft

Each enemy has a weak spot, and stealth kills will let you lot take out the enemy without them alerting their friends. This ways that almost all of Extraction is spent slowly crouch-walking through similar-looking corridors, firing ane shot at a time. If this were intended to be a stealth game, that could be a compelling source of tension. But the discovery mechanics are finicky and unreliable. Occasionally, an errant pace would give away my position from two rooms away — more frequently, I could walk directly into touching-altitude of an Archæan before it had whatsoever idea I was there. This ends up making the stealth experience slipshod rather than challenging.

By the time I had played for about 20 hours, I simply ran through levels, knowing exactly when and where to stride to avoid alerting enemies. When I did happen to attract the attention of a horde of Archæans — a moment that should feel exciting and chaotic — the game instead turned into a dingy mess. Enemy animations stutter across the screen, making headshots lopsided and bad-mannered, and I also frequently got pinned against the game's awkwardly designed rooms and bludgeoned to death with no promise of survival.

When your Operator dies during an Incursion, they're placed on the MIA list, which is one of Extraction'south better mechanics. The next time you render to that specific zone, ane of your objectives volition be to rescue the missing Operator, which is washed by completing an entertaining picayune minigame where you pull them from an alien tree. Until y'all complete the rescue, that Operator is locked and unavailable for further Incursions.

In guild to keep your Operator from going MIA, you can too cull to extract at whatsoever point in the centre of an Incursion, no affair how many of the three objectives you have completed. There's no cost for an early extraction other than missing out on whatever XP the rest of the mission had to offer, so this really never feels like balancing an interesting risk confronting a reward.

Image: Ubisoft

Extraction too features a challenge system, a la Phone call of Duty, that requires yous to use specific weapon attachments or abilities. This arrangement is called Studies, and is equally close as Extraction gets to specific missions. They're location-specific, simply because there aren't unique mechanics between the locations, each Written report is basically interchangeable with the others. At that place are over 100 of these in the game and they're (sadly) the best way to level upward.

But the Studies system — similar everything else in Extraction — is a grind. For more than twenty hours, I loaded into Incursions, did my 3 Written report challenges, completed my three random objectives, and extracted. At the end of each run, I'd watch the XP counter tick upward toward a new piece of equipment I knew I wouldn't use. Then I'd showtime the whole affair again.

Because all of the progression is linear, rewards are just handed to yous in a set order, and rarely make you experience significantly stronger. In other words, Extraction is a very flat experience. With more than fleshed-out missions, this could exist a nifty game, but as it stands, the system lacks the peaks and valleys of random loot that help brand most grindy PVE games fun. The promise of an unexpected high is what makes the grinding worth it. Random drops on guns, upgrades, or whatsoever equipment at all could have gone a long style toward making me desire to queue up for but ane more than Incursion for a chance at a rare advantage.

Fifty-fifty worse, all these levels and upgrades always experience like they're pushing you toward something cool, but once you lot get to the endgame, it turns out they never were. The "cease game" is just more than of the same Incursions, but with harder difficulties, a smaller pool of Operators (which changes every few days), and some modifiers.

Extraction's grinding is no more or less rewarding than a clicker game. Its best asset is its underlying mechanics, which make for a solid shooter if you tin can observe the right group of friends with which to play information technology. In the cease, it's not much more than a fashion to impale time until ameliorate, more than interesting games arrive.

Rainbow Vi Extraction will be released on Jan. xx on PlayStation four, PlayStation 5, Google Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X, and is available on Xbox Game Pass for all platforms. It is besides bachelor on Windows PC via Steam and the Ubisoft Connect store. The game was reviewed on PC using a code provided by Ubisoft. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These practice not influence editorial content, though Vocalisation Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You lot can find additional information almost Polygon's ideals policy hither .

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Source: https://www.polygon.com/reviews/22890631/rainbow-six-extraction-review-xbox-game-pass-windows-pc-series-x-ps5-release-date

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