It’s fitting that the alien outbreak at the center of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction originated in the resort town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Indeed, while there have been many multiplayer tactical shooters before, this one feels like the first to ever have stakes that really mean something. You’ll eventually have 18 playable operators to choose from, but your injuries and MIA status will persist between missions until successfully resolved, making this a game that sometimes refuses to let you play favorites, or even on your own terms. Knowing that a single mistake will not only foul up your current run but also require you to change things up in future missions brings a real weight to every action.
If there’s a problem to this experience it’s the punishing level of perfection that’s demanded of players from the get-go. In short, you’re part of the Rainbow Six counterterrorism squad and neither you nor your online teammates possess the skills of the non-player-controlled operatives in this unit that represents the most competent military force in the world.
Rainbow Six Extraction doesn’t provide adequate training for players diving in for the first time, nor does it acknowledge how difficult it may be for randomly assigned teammates to perform precise operations. The game is never more difficult than at the start of each of its biomes, because you have to learn the 36 maps—which range from touristy Liberty Island, New York, to the barren streets of Nome, Alaska—play as each operative, and develop tactical strategies in a risk-filled environment that brutally punishes your failures.
Just as you’ve gotten used to low-level Grunt chargers and explosive-backed Breachers, you’ll start being wiped out by mine-laying Sowers, cloaking Lurkers, and shapeshifting Tormentors. This steep difficulty curve never lessens, though the game’s premise serves as a partial and clever justification for that. After all, your Rainbow Six operators—who together form the Rainbow Exogenous Analysis and Containment Team, or REACT—are learning about these aliens as you progress throughout the campaign, thanks to the individualized Studies (side objects) that players are assigned alongside their standard co-op mission objectives.
By largely avoiding tutorials, Rainbow Six Extraction hopes to evoke the sensation of battling the unknown, and that’s terrific when it comes to each alien encounter. You’re given a clear tactical map of each sub-zone, a tightly focused objective to complete, and a brief 15-minute window in which to accomplish your task, all of which lends itself to tense and action-packed gameplay. But it also means that players have to learn how their abilities and equipment work directly in the field, and that can be exasperating, especially given the challenge of having to also quickly adapt to your randomly matched squadmates. Bring your friends, or at least acquaintances with microphones, lest you be frustrated enough to tackle missions in single player, a scaled-down affair that misses out on the game’s appealing teamwork.
Rainbow Six Extraction’s masocore ethos, though, very much pays off if you’re in a squad of communicative players. The time spent learning each operator, whether by choice or necessity while your favorites are out of action, gradually pays off as you note the most efficient synergies, like how operator IQ’s ability to scan through walls helps to quickly pinpoint the three pesky terminals of a Triangulation mission, or how operator Vigil’s cloaking power ensures that your team can stealthily takedown enemies as required in a Biopsy assignment.
At its best, every mission is tight, nerve-wracking, and—when things go wrong—gloriously hectic. Appealing as it may be to get the higher experience rewards of completing all three missions (or sub-zones) of a given map, there’s a reason why players always have the option to extract. Each choice is a keen balance of risk and reward. For one, do you gamble on finding additional resources beyond the next airlock, or do you withdraw?
Pushing on is also a matter of trust in the game. In Dark Souls, you get one chance to fight back to your corpse to retrieve its experience, but if you’re downed in Rainbow Six Extraction, you’re relying on your squad to carry your body to an exfiltration point. And if they don’t, you’ll have to send a new operative on a rescue mission to do the job.
In the end, this is a fundamentally a grind-heavy game, as players rerun the same 12 mission types over and over again in various locations, slowly unlocking new lore about the alien forces. But by introducing difficulty “mutation” modifiers and offering a wide variety of team compositions, Rainbow Six Extraction is able to mask its most routine elements and continue, even at lower difficulties, to keep players excitedly on their toes.
The game was covered with a review code provided by Ubisoft.
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