An Uninspired Shooter

Ubisoft’s latest first-person shooter is built on the bones of Rainbow Six Siege’s Outbreak event, which threw its players into a sci-fi alien invasion. Rainbow Six Extraction serves up a direct sequel to Outbreak, picking up where its story left off with the world suffering from an overwhelming alien invasion.

- Tim Augustin

A GLANCE

DEVELOPER Ubisoft Montreal

PUBLISHER Ubisoft

GENRE First-person, tactical shooter

PLATFORM PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox X/S, Luna, Stadia

PLAYERS SINGLE , CO-OP

Extraction’s story kicks off right after a hostile alien force known as the Archaeans invades Earth, infesting famous monuments and creating mysterious nests. To combat this threat, Operators from Siege form REACT, a group that infiltrates infested locations all around the world to extract information about these creepy aliens. While the game can be played solo, it’s best enjoyed in co-op multiplayer where Operators work together in teams of three.

Each incursion takes you to a map composed of three smaller locations. Once you complete a sub-map’s objective, you can choose to either extract early with all your XP, or keep going to the next area to complete more objectives for even more XP; but it’s risky business going for 100% completion every time.

Extraction feels purposefully oriented towards the survival genre, pushing a more methodical style of gameplay than Siege did. When Operators die in combat, you don’t simply fail an incursion you lose access to that Operator. If you want to use them again, you’ll have to complete special MIA missions and extract them from a map safely. During incursions, damaged Operators can never fully recover lost HP. Health pick-ups only temporarily boost your HP bar, and hurt Operators will be unusable in other missions till they are fully healed in real-time.