Rainbow Six Extraction

It can be hard to make those calls correctly, and failure can come in an instant. But isn’t that what makes gambling so exciting?

You never fully appreciate what you have, they say, until it’s gone. Which seems to explain the origin of Extraction, spun off as it is from Outbreak, the 2018 Rainbow Six Siege event which introduced zombielike aliens to the tactical shooter for a single month. And if we were looking for further evidence that absence makes the heart grow fonder, we needn’t look much further than our precious operators.

Like much of Extraction – the gunplay, the gadgets, the Real Blast tech that enables you to demolish selected parts of its levels – these characters are lifted directly from Siege’s now-enormous roster, with just the occasional tweak to the 18 on offer. Jäger’s turret now shoots incoming enemies rather than just popping grenades. Pulse’s heartbeat sensor picks out the pulse of nests that spawn more monsters, Gauntlet style, when activated. Sledge, meanwhile, remains joyously simple: a man with a big hammer and an allegedly Scottish accent that has a tendency to wander.

The character designs remain bland, and we’d struggle to tell you anything about their personalities, but Extraction finds a different way for players to bond with its operators: by putting them under threat. Not in the abstract alien-invasion kind of way but something more direct: if your current avatar dies on a mission, the game will erase them from the roster, a trick that works just as well as it did in XCOM. And so, against all odds, we find ourselves caring about the hockey-masked cipher known as Vigil, lost in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district.