Ubisoft rethinks Rainbow Six: As a gritty co-op shooter, Extraction demands everything from you. Only the long-term motivation remains unclear.
I’m diving out of a helicopter. The roar of the rotor blades still roars in my ears. Slowly I move forward alongside my comrades. Loud gasps echo through the corridors. Little by little we take out one target after the other until we finally reach our missing team member.
But the moment I throw Sledge over our shoulder, I hear loud screeching. We have been discovered! I pull the pistol from my holster and try to shoot my way clear to the extraction point. Aliens pour in on us, there are dozens of adversaries, slimy creatures covered in pustules, faceless yet terrifying.
I get hit, can barely get one foot in front of the other due to the extra weight, but there’s no way I’m letting my Team Rainbow down. Slowly, the capsule looms in the mist. I rush to the emergency button, put Sledge into the capsule with my last ounce of strength. Yellow smoke rises and before my eyes close, I hear the familiar rotor blades coming closer.
In the co-op shooter Rainbow Six Extraction, three of us fight our way through contaminated areas full of creatures to save the parasite-infested USA. In order to succeed, the special unit “Reac” was brought into being. In the twelve so-called containment zones, it is our task to find out more about the parasite and fight it. Can this be as much fun as a match in Rainbow Six Siege?
Table of Contents
This time it’s not a virus, but a parasite!
In terms of content, Extraction is loosely based on the then Outbreak event from Rainbow Six Siege. A parasite that endangers the world, a special unit with a name that is far too long, extremely cool one liners.
Fortunately, Ubisoft also knows that the frame story won’t win an Oscar and holds back on exposition. But even if the story around the Chimera parasite plays a clearly subordinate role, it is still told in high-quality cutscenes. Little by little, we also unlock so-called Codex entries that tell us more about the alien invasion.
Once we have survived the first section, we can move on to the next airlock. These often contain crates to refill our gadgets or medikits.
Gameplay-wise, there are a surprising number of parallels in Extraction to another co-op shooter, the challenging GTFO. But before casual gamers fall off their chairs, there’s a clear all-clear: Ubisoft has made Rainbow Six Extraction more beginner-friendly than GTFO and also provides four different difficulty levels to adapt the action to your own abilities.
The horror elements are also present in such a low concentration that even the most fearful among you will find it fun. Rainbow Six Extraction plays extremely well as a solo player. The difficulty level is automatically adjusted to the number of players, as there are no AI companions in the game.
A healthy middle ground for core and casual players
In the missions, which are each divided into three sections, you must complete various objectives alone or as a team. You can decide at any time whether to request an extraction or run to the next section. It is important to keep an eye on the health, ammunition and gadgets of your team mates to assess whether the risk is worth it. The further you get, the more experience points you get after an extraction.
The objectives are randomly generated and thus always provide a breath of fresh air. Although some tasks play similarly, the selection is so large that it should take a while before signs of fatigue appear.
At times you will have to scan different areas while fending off waves of enemies. This makes for action-packed panic moments in which you have to keep a cool head. However, if you prepare the room with traps and reinforced walls beforehand, you will make life much easier for yourself. Another time, you have to take down a certain elite enemy with a sneak attack. This mission objective requires a much quieter approach than usual and forces you to be tactically astute.
Furthermore, there are nine acts for each area, each with three tasks, which are not mandatory, but reward you with massive experience, visual fripperies such as weapon pendants and story snippets upon completion. While the first tasks are a snap and only require pinging or killing enemies in a certain way, they become increasingly challenging and make you play previously visited locations in a different way.
Nevertheless, there is a small drop of bitterness: visiting the mission sections several times is a clear component of Rainbow Six Extraction, which is why it is all the more regrettable that there are only three per location. This would not only provide visual variety, but also give room for playful idiosyncrasies.
A varied alien invasion
But the areas would be nothing without the archaea that inhabit them. For these aliens, however, Ubisoft doesn’t clumsily copy the usual zombie archetypes, but expands the assortment with meanies with special abilities. Which alien types you encounter on the next mission is randomly selected and often requires rethinking.
Some enemies hide their weak points and must first be stunned with gadgets so that you can take them out. Others teleport through the area at lightning speed or lay traps. Even magma-like puddles that move slowly towards the player can be deadly. If you have to deal with several types of special aliens at once, chaos can quickly break out, which is difficult to control.
To help you prepare for a mission, Ubisoft provides you with 18 operators. These familiar faces all come from Rainbow Six Siege and basically have the same abilities and weapons. The former have only been slightly modified for some operators in order to better adapt to Extraction. In addition, some Operators have been given an assault rifle in their arsenal if they were on the side of the defenders in Siege.
Once you’ve picked a favourite, Ubisoft will throw a spanner in the works. If you escape from the last mission by hook or by crook, the played operator will still have the same health at the end of a game and will be branded as injured. Before you can start again with full health, you must first complete missions with other operators.
In the long run, this encourages variety, as it forces you to try out other operators and get to know their characteristics. The situation is different if your character dies during a mission and your team does not manage to extract your operator from the area. Then he is considered missing and you can no longer use the respective operator until you have freed him from the area. What reads frightening at first is actually less drastic. If you try higher difficulty levels and fail, you can play the same area again on the lowest level and free your operator without much effort. On the one hand, this is fair, but on the other hand, some of the thrill is lost due to this lack of consistency.
The eternal old chestnut of the motivation spiral
We gamers love progress bars! And who, if not Ubisoft could know this better. Each of the 18 operators has ten levels, which unlock useful bonuses when reached, which are indispensable especially on high difficulty levels. Doc, for example, has more syringes that give additional life later on. Smoke, on the other hand, can revive himself with shots when he is down. But the arsenal of weapons is also expanded as the level increases.
Furthermore, there is an overarching level system with which you unlock various milestones and further operators. The milestones give access to further areas and missions as well as to the end-game activities. Whether the latter offer enough motivation in the long run depends on how meticulously Ubisoft feeds the so-called “Malstrom Protocol” with content. The challenges, which change weekly, are definitely some of the most difficult content in Rainbow Six Extraction, so it should take quite a while to reach the top ranks.
But at the moment this mode is not enough to be fun in the long run. For one thing, the challenges take place on the same maps that we have already gone through in normal mode. Due to the small number of sections, you’ve had your fill of them before you’ve even reached the endgame. On the other hand, I miss PvP modes à la Left 4 Dead or ones that play fundamentally differently. An example would be a wave mode in which you compete against an opposing team. To add spice, in the old Tetris style, defeated enemies could appear in the opposing team’s game.
Another problem is the rewards. Gaining a rank in a pure PvE game is less satisfying if there is no rank-based matchmaking or, more generally, no opponents in front of whom I can brag about my earned rank. Moreover, helmets in the corresponding rank colour are not much of an incentive. Nevertheless, you will be busy for 30 to 40 hours, depending on how much you can get out of the end-game spiral. However, the foundation has been laid and the chance is there to make Rainbow Six Extraction an exciting game in the long run.
Ubisoft is feathering its nest and that’s a good thing!
Extraction could be an extra mode from Rainbow Six Siege. Because the basis was taken over from the ground up. Movement, weapon handling, operators and their weapons and abilities play great as usual. Which is why there is no reason to tinker with these systems.
The only criticism is the somewhat meagre hit feedback. Shotguns in particular don’t feel very powerful, as you only get little visual feedback when you hit them. With the exception of the explosive enemies, most creatures dissolve into black particles as if by magic. Fans of splatter effects will therefore have to lower their expectations.
A visually solid foundation with room for improvement
Veterans of Rainbow Six Siege, meanwhile, will immediately feel at home. At first glance, not much has changed. Only in detail do you notice a slightly better lighting and sharper textures. The various areas in particular have been designed very sterilely and “shine” with a lack of detail.
Although the areas could hardly be more different nominally, as you are sometimes in Alaska and sometimes in New York, in the end the levels look relatively the same. Interiors also look as if they have never really been inhabited and have the atmosphere of a surreal furniture store. Especially for future content patches, I would therefore like to see more visual variety.
Ubisoft, on the other hand, manages to bridge the gap between horror and action with the general aesthetics. The enemy and sound design provide the necessary creepy factor, but without ever being too scary. Because the often well-lit areas as well as the low gore factor unbalance the horror scenario immensely. Whether this is good or bad is something everyone must decide for themselves. But in any case, Ubisoft makes Rainbow Six Extraction more accessible to a broader mass of players.
In addition, there is nothing to criticise about the technical condition. In my entire playing time I have not encountered a single bug. Performance-wise, Rainbow Six Extraction runs smoothly even on older computers and without any notable FPS drops, even in action-packed scenes. We tested with an RTX 3080 / AMD Ryzen 7 5800x with a resolution of 2560×1440 (WQHD) and a system with a GTX 1070 / Intel i5-6500 and a resolution of 2560×1440 (WQHD).
Finally, it should be mentioned with praise that Ubisoft is promoting Rainbow Six Extraction directly into the Microsoft Game Pass at release. But even for the reduced full price of 40 €, this co-op shooter is a good deal.
Editor’s Verdict
As a long-time player of Rainbow Six Siege and a friend of the rare co-op games, I have followed the development of Extraction eagerly since its announcement. Even though I have to admit that my expectations were not particularly high thanks to the questionable decisions on the part of Ubisoft lately. On the one hand, there was the grandiose NFT business idea or the messed-up state of (The Settlers). But I confess to having been proved wrong.
Rainbow Six Extraction offers everything I want as a tactical shooter fan: challenging gameplay, smooth weapon handling and a large selection of operators and gadgets that make life much easier. Team play is rewarded, but you can also have a lot of fun as a solo player thanks to the difficulty scaling. The balancing of almost all items, operators, weapons and enemies is so successful that you are automatically tempted to try out everything.
Only the visual design of the towns and interiors can be criticised in part. The sterile environments seem a bit monotonous in the long run, which is why I would like to see improvements in this area in future content patches. Despite this flaw, I have a lot of fun with Extraction and will continue to fight my way through the alien-infested areas.
