Before Covid-19 spread around the world and killed millions, Rainbow Six extraction was first known as 2019 Rainbow Six quarantine. As the pandemic grew, the game went silent on radio for a while before understandably being renamed extraction. Well, after all that, Ubisoft’s latest and weirdest entry in the Rainbow Six franchise is finally out and I’m not sure what shocked me more: is it how much I enjoy killing aliens or something extraction manages to be fun in an already crowded genre?
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction is a (presumably) non-canon entry in the long-running tactical shooter franchise that features characters and weapons from siege. extraction Based directly on a limited time mode it was first seen in Rainbow Six victorye, and the original layer in this mode exists in extraction. This time the eclectic cast of operators is out siege do not fight against terrorists or other human soldiers, but against extraterrestrial parasites called… *searches on the keyboard,* the Archaeans. The game often just refers to them as Aliens or Arkies, so I’ll do the same. These nasty creatures infect humans and turn them into dangerous alien monsters. It’s up to Team Rainbow and REACT to come together and stop the alien invasion in one infected space at a time.
In order to defeat the aliens, teams of three Rainbow Operators are sent to different locations in the United States, such as NYC or Alaska. Each location contains three maps and each map is divided into three small zones. While each zone is handcrafted and stays the same, they contain randomly selected objectives that change with each game. You may need to kill a specific target, save someone, or activate some bombs.
not how Left 4 dead, back 4 blood, or The anacrusis, in extraction, you don’t shoot at hundreds of enemies and take on big waves of endless baddies while rushing to an exit. Instead of this, extraction is slower and more tactical. You can go in secretly extraction, sneak up behind enemies to take them out quietly, or you can choose to use the levels’ destructive malleability to carve your own paths through rooms full of infected baddies. Once you complete an objective, either through the use of stealth and gadgets or through brute force and loud explosions, you can move on to the next objective. Or you can leave And you might want to, given how the game handles injuries and “death.”
In Rainbow Six extraction, taking damage counts. While you can heal yourself temporarily during a mission, once you leave the mission, that health is removed and your operator remains injured and unplayable until you earn XP with other operators. Earning XP heals injured staff, allowing you to bring them back into combat. And once they reach a certain point, you can send them off early with less than 100 health. It’s risky, but sometimes required if you prefer a particular operator’s skills.
For example, I love a character’s sensor called Pulse, which allows him to track targets and alien nests through walls, along with the ability to ping them for teammates. He’s very useful, so I try to keep him healthy. This caused me to abandon an extraction point mission because I took some damage and didn’t want to risk taking more. And if an operator runs out of health and falls unconscious during a mission, you won’t be able to use it until you save it in a later mission. If you don’t, you will eventually get them back, but they take an XP hit and are injured.
This whole system reminded me of XCOMCharacter management from . While you can’t permanently lose an operator extraction, the added risk of getting hurt, losing XP or not being able to play like that for a few missions is enough to make missions more engaging and exciting.
Of course, this is a Ubisoft-developed Tom Clancy game, so you’ll have to deal with some of the usual propaganda. There are many American flags being overturned or destroyed, symbolizes the downfall of the country and its values, blah blah blah. In this world police and SWAT are gods or at least superheroes who will save us all from evil menace of inhuman parasites not the quick-to-kill and impossible-to-trust assholes We see in reality. So much of the world is covered in this facade of patriotism and propaganda that it can sometimes be hard not to laugh or roll your eyes every few minutes. As someone who has played and enjoyed many Tom Clancy games over the past 20 years, I’m used to it and just laugh at it these days. But playing with someone who hasn’t touched many Clancy games reminded me that this is all weird and feels very detached in 2022.
If you can take some weird copaganda and don’t mind gross alien stuff like goo and throbbing meat pods, then I think there’s a lot to like extraction. When co-op shooters start to mingle these days and everyone relies on hordes of enemies and fast-paced action, extraction appears to be the perfect alternative, offering a tighter, more tactical, and unique “zombie shooter” that overcomes the masses of infected for self-contained levels and neat squad management systems. Add in a solid and satisfying progression system that frequently dish out meaningful upgrades, and you have something that I can easily see attracting a lot of people.
It also helps that the game launched on Game Pass, so many of you can download and try it for free. Just don’t forget to laugh at some of the more absurd Clancy plays.
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