Rainbow Six Extraction

These operators lay siege to a new genre entirely

Ubisoft could be forgiven for continuing to sit comfortably on the popular and profitable Siege. After all, servers have been busy and updates have been plentiful since 2015. The next Rainbow Six, however, is an unexpected mixture of the familiar and the new, and it just might work.

Excepting the largely ignored PvE elements, Siege is a tense and often slow-paced 5v5 PvP experience. Extraction, on the other hand, is entirely PvE and will involve a lot more action. An alien race known as the Archaeans has landed on Earth and taken over locations in New York, San Francisco, and Alaska. It’s your job as part of a team of up to three people (you can play solo if you’re brave) to infiltrate these locations, and complete objectives while defending yourself from a variety of often fast-moving creatures. It’s perhaps surprising, then, that all the player characters have been lifted directly from Siege, with a mix of attackers and defenders.

There are some elements that will remain familiar to Siege fans. Nine Operators have been revealed so far, all of whom carry some of their signature weapons and abilities, although new upgrades and gear designed specifically for Extraction will be unlocked as you progress. Drones can (and should) still be used to scout the way ahead, and destructible environments remain. Siege characters look surprisingly comfortable here, as we see Alibi using her hologram decoy to draw fire and Sledge making his own door to surprise an enemy.

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