Rainbow Six Extraction is a square peg in a round hole. It shares most of its DNA with one of the last decade’s best multiplayer games, the asymmetric tactical shooter Rainbow Six Siege. All of Extraction’s playable characters come directly from Siege’s roster, with similar loadouts and only minor revisions to the functionality of each operator’s gadget. It also adopts Siege’s destructible environments, so you can shred most walls back to their studs with the right gadgets or enough bullets. Extraction even continues the sci-fi narrative that Siege started back in 2018 with the limited-time PvE event, Outbreak.
All of those ingredients are present in Extraction, but they’ve been mixed in such a way that they fail to impart any flavour. Destruction works exactly as it does in Siege, but there’s no benefit to opening new pathways, and no way to exploit breachable surfaces thanks to the predominantly horizontal map design. Some operators have been creatively reworked to suit the new horde threat, but others seem out of place and ill-equipped. With so many of its components carried over verbatim from Siege, Extraction feels as much like a limited-time game mode as Outbreak did.
The story picks up shortly after the events of Outbreak, with its alien parasites – dubbed Archæans – springing up all over North America and evolving to pose a greater challenge for team Rainbow. You start on Liberty Island in New York City, travel west to San Francisco, north to Alaska, and finally south to New Mexico. There are three maps to choose from in each location, but it doesn’t really matter which one you’re playing on as the objectives you’ll need to complete are randomly assigned when you start a match.
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