Rainbow Six Extraction Review
need to know
What is it? Co-op spinoff of Rainbow Six Siege
expect to pay $40/£40
developer Ubisoft Montreal
Publisher Ubisoft
audit date RTX 3060, Ryzen 7 5700G 3.8Ghz, 16GB RAM
multiplayer game? Up to 3 people co-op
association Official website
Rainbow Six Extraction was announced in a world we no longer live in: the world of 2019. At the time, the co-op Siege spin-off FPS was called “Rainbow Six Quarantine” (ha!). It’s an unfortunate time to make a game about a parasitic virus, but it’s a good time to bring back the dormant cooperative zombie shooter. Siege’s 2018 Outbreak is a brief but terrific experience of what Left 4 Siege could be, and I hope Extraction turns this 2-hour mode into a massive campaign collection.
Three years later, Extraction is not only one of the many co-op shooters on the block, it’s almost unrecognizable in the original Outbreak campaign. It’s the anti-Left 4 Dead – a precise, grueling survival game that keeps your head down and never pokes a bear. If you do, Extraction’s sadistic AI takes over, eager to punish the smallest error of judgment.
It’s a mean game that can generate massive excitement, but its strict rules make some awkward design choices stand out. Extraction is also a smaller game than I expected — Ubi’s decision to drop its price to $40 and bring it to PC Game Pass at launch now makes sense. I really enjoyed getting to grips with each of the dozen or so objective types and maps, but the quests started getting really fast.
sharp and clear
The core of the extraction task is to randomly draw a map of three objects from a pool of 12 objects. Objectives must be processed in order, each occupying its own piece of the map.
Your squad of three (or just you, if you’re solo) is dropped into these places with no context other than the current mission at hand. No activity is associated with goals such as “find a safe house” or “cross this crumbling bridge.” You just get the job done and get as much XP as possible. The sparse format worked for the first 10 hours as I learned how each target worked and experimented with operators. Every mission throws an obstacle or two in a way I’ve never seen before, whether it’s a new alien enemy (called a primordial creature) that can plant sneaky flash bombs, or a modifier, Step on the danger by slowly covering each surface with black “spread” slime.
I also died early, much more than I usually do when I pick up a new FPS. It took a while to realize that you can’t play Extraction like other co-op shooters. Back 4 Blood is about running a horde while running to the next goal, and sprinting around buildings full of primal creatures is asking for death.
My squad is always better when we’re crouching or walking around, carefully choosing which enemies to engage or avoid. The format appears to be inspired by the stealth games of GTFO, a survival horror co-op shooter that recently escaped Early Access. Operators can go down with just a few primeval attacks, and even if they survive the encounter, they can never regain lost health. Gadgets like a health kit or Doc’s stim pistol can temporarily restore health, but it will fade away over time. This vulnerability heightens tensions as we go deeper into enemy territory, trying not to let the ancient creatures scream long enough. A screaming Archaean is a bit like warning a witch in Left 4 Dead, but worse because every nearby lair starts spawning enemies until destroyed.
Critical Strike Chance
Thankfully, thousands of hours of Rainbow Six siege responses came in handy. Extracted shots and moves are the same. The basic grunt of methodical room cleaning and one-hit kills feels cool. Every gun that isn’t a shotgun comes with a suppressor that you should never take off.
I’ve been through countless close calls, I’ve walked past the door, been spotted by a primordial creature, and got a headshot before it could peek. I’m also surprised how much I enjoy dealing with Sprawl – the black ooze spreads quickly when the lair is disturbed. The sound of it crawling on every surface is disgusting, and I never tire of filming it to “draw” a navigable path through the room.
Once my teammates and I got stuck, headshot everything in our path, stealth kill lairs to stop enemies from spawning, and shoot nasty black stuff, mostly grunting enemies on the lower two difficulty (total four) becomes too easy.
Hey, I know that rabbit. (Image credit: Ubisoft)
When you crank it up to Serious or Serious difficulty, things get less balanced. As the heat builds, basic navigation becomes a chore. Bigger enemies won’t knock down their weak spots all at once, and even if you kill them quickly, they’ll still likely warn everything in their ears and activate each lair to spawn more enemies. There seems to be no limit to how many primates can spawn in a lair, so if we can’t destroy each lair before then, they’ll draw out more aliens than we can reasonably shoot.
This can be frustrating, not only because dormant and active lairs look and sound basically the same, but also because how well we perform after a billion enemies appear basically doesn’t matter. At best, we exit the mission early and take the loss, which usually means a small enough XP reward that it’s not worth our time in the first place. Worst case, we keep fighting and possibly die, which just brings new annoying chores. Characters who get lost on the battlefield become “MIA” operators and cannot be used again unless you rescue them in a follow-up mission. I like to switch my operator selections when they get injured or go to MIA, but having to do the same tasks every rescue gets old quickly.
Back 4 Blood also had issues with early adjustment difficulties. Again, I think extraction could make some adjustments to enemy spawn rates. What I’ve encountered feels less like an AI director dynamically deciding what we can or can’t handle, and more like an open faucet spewing out powerful enemies at random unless we turn it off.
operator
It can be confusing how much to extract, it’s nice to see the operator and see a bunch of familiar faces from Siege. Ubi picked 18 operators from an existing roster and slightly modified their existing kits to accommodate alien zombie murders (they’re no longer Operation Rainbow Six, they’re members of REACT).
Most operators are well integrated into PvE action – Doc and Finka’s healing techniques and Rook’s armor plates need little change. Others are slightly tweaked, like the Pulse and IQ’s sensors, which now detect nests and spare ammo from a distance, rather than heartbeats and enemy gadgets. It’s great to see an operator I never really work with in Siege becoming a favorite in Extraction. Alibi’s holographic decoys are terrible in a PvP setting, but they’re awesome for drawing primates away from me.
I also like that you can upgrade your operator with permanent upgrades, such as extra stimulation lenses for the Doc or longer range scans for the Pulse.After years of using these operators in static configuration, carefully balanced, it’s good, but not also Nice, it feels great to “overclock” my favorite operators out of their siege limits. Ever wished that Rook could run faster, or that Sledge’s hammer could punch a giant hole in the wall? Now they can.
Unfortunately, most operator gadgets (and helper gadgets) are only useful in context. Hibana is one of Siege’s most popular operators thanks to her hard-breaking projectile launcher, basically just a slower way of throwing shock grenades in Extraction. Jäger’s ADS turrets are great for taking down some enemies before they blow up, but they’re too slow and bulky to deploy in combat. IQ can find ammo on the map, but it’s not hard to find things without her. Due to the high lethality extracted, there is little reason for our squad to justify operators who don’t contribute to armor or health in some way.
It’s a bit of a trick to use a gun that Rook has never used in Siege, such as the 417 DMR. (Image credit: Ubisoft)
Secondary gadgets have the same problem. Ubi made a bunch of new projectiles for Archaean, like scanning grenades, a “glue” trap that slows down enemies like the ones in Prey, and a literal force field that blocks ranged attacks, but these aren’t for me The mind is immediately out of date when I realize that a shock grenade can stun an enemy, clear the area of sprawl, destroy a nest or destroy the wall between you and your target. There’s also a third slot where you can equip extra ammo or drones, but those seem like unnecessary luxuries when I can bring a self-recovery kit or extra body armor.
As I slowly discovered in Extraction’s quest variety, once you’ve unlocked the operator, there’s very little to do. For hours I’ve been pecking at the places I’ve been, accomplishing the same random goals in the same places, wondering what else I can get. Turns out the answer was a bunch of cosmetics that I didn’t care about and an endgame mode called Vortex Protocol, which increased the normal number of targets to nine. After realizing that this mode doesn’t sound interesting at all, I have no reason to play Rainbow Six anymore.
Nevermind – I had about 20 good hours in a nice creepy FPS, and it shot well. That, and the reason it was included in PC Game Pass at launch, was enough to get some friends to give it a shot.
I can’t shake the idea of what an L4D-inspired extraction of campaign structures would look like. There’s a lot of fun in the slow, deliberate co-op combat, but its disjointed missions cause the entire game to feel aimless. By trying to increase replayability through randomization, Ubisoft made a less replayable game.
Rainbow Six Extraction wasn’t at all the spiritual Left 4 Dead 3 I was hoping for at the time, which is fine because that game, Back 4 Blood, only came out a few months ago.
But unlike 2019, Extraction is not alone. Over the past few years, many cool co-op games have been vying to be the stars of my Discord server – Back 4 Blood is great, Anacrusis is fun, Ready Or Not is cool, GTFO is fun, Deep Rock Galactic and World War Z is still being updated, and Warhammer 40K: Darktide is coming.
In 2022, there are a lot of fun ways to shoot AI baddies with buds, so it’s impressive that Extraction is different from every game I just listed. It tries to be slower, more strategic, and even succeeds in most cases. But punishment isn’t what my friends and I usually look for in a co-op shooter (we got enough punishment from Hunt: Showdown’s competitive round), so I suspect the extraction will never be the way we kicked off Friday night. game.
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