Rainbow Six Extraction Preview – Name Changed

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Suppose you have a game in development with the word ‘quarantine’ in the title, but suddenly the corona crisis breaks out, quarantines and lockdowns worldwide become normal and your title appears to have a completely different meaning. Then of course you come up with a new name. For example, the game that was once announced as Tom Candy’s Rainbow Six Quarantine may now be known as Rainbow Six Extraction. The game itself didn’t change, of course, so we’re still dealing with a product that originated as a spin-off of the still popular Rainbow Six Siege. That game focuses mainly on battles that players fight against each other and is therefore quite large in e-sports. However, Extraction promises to be a game where players work together to defeat all kinds of dangerous AI-controlled monsters. The Operators you play with, like much of the gameplay, will be recognizable enough for Siege players, while the game should also attract players who haven’t fallen for the PvP concept before.

A problem arises for us here, because we cannot interpret Rainbow Six Extraction within the framework that Siege has already placed. Like many long-running games, Rainbow Six Siege has changed a lot over the years and we are not active players. That makes it impossible to effectively interpret the similarities and differences in gameplay between the two games. If your main question is whether it is worth playing Extraction next to Siege, we recommend that you look for other previews, because we can’t determine that. So what can we answer? Well, to the simple question of whether Rainbow Six Extraction, all on its own, seems to be a fun game. To determine that, we recently played the game for just under two hours. As is often the case with Ubisoft previews in 2020 and 2021, this went through a streaming service, so that the performance during gameplay did not cooperate completely. In addition, this means that we had to wait until we could download and view the footage we recorded before we could appreciate the graphics. All in all, of course, not ideal, but at the moment often the only way to write hands-on previews, and something is better than nothing.

Extraction builds on an event in the world of Rainbow Six Siege called ‘Outbreak’. Outbreak was part of the Chimera Expansion and had players in teams of three investigate the outbreak of a mysterious virus that turned people into all kinds of terrible monsters. The gameplay in Outbreak was also PvE, so in that respect Siege players have been able to get a small taste of what Extraction is all about, only this new game goes a lot deeper. Outbreak, for example, only contained three missions, while Extraction promises to have a much wider offering. Yet much will be the same. Think of recognizable Operators. If you’ve never played Siege, names like Hibana, Doc, and Pulse won’t tell you anything, but otherwise you’ll probably recognize the range of soldiers available. Each Operator has a specific bonus in the form of an item. For example, Lion has a drone with which he can see all moving enemies in the vicinity and Pulse has a cardiac sensor. This allows him to track down people in need of rescue and determine the location of monster nests.

Besides that specific item, your further loadout consists of a primary and secondary weapon and two ‘React Techs’, one of which is in the Gear category and the other in the Explosive category. Think of things like frag grenades for the latter and for Gear handy drones with which you can explore the environment. As in Siege, exploration is an important activity, as things can go wrong very quickly in Extraction.

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