The 22nd game in Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six series, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction, has finally arrived. With its most recent predecessor being a massive hit (to this day it still is!) it was only a matter of time before a new one was released. Originally called Rainbow Six: Quarantine back when it was first announced in 2019, but now renamed Rainbow Six: Extraction (for obvious reasons), developers Ubisoft Montreal have delivered a very interesting and somewhat polarizing experience.
With no campaign and very little story to go off of, all you really need to know is areas of major cities like New York and San Francisco are infested with alien-like organisms and operators need to infiltrate these areas to either rescue, destroy, or collect data. There are nine operators to start with and each of them has a unique skill to bring to the table, so going in with a strategy will be very helpful. Every mission will be in a group of three. Ubisoft was kind enough to supply us with three copies of the game so being able to form a team would be very easy (since the game wasn’t out yet at the time of writing this). My teammates were none other than fellow Gaming Cypher reviewers Greg Vander Velde and Steven Reyes.
Before continuing on, I asked both Greg and Steven their initial thoughts on their experience with Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction. Here’s what they had to say:
Steven Reyes: “I would have to say this game will make or break your squad. It is heavily team-work based. If you guys can’t work as a team you will not succeed. If nothing else, this game is addictive in the single fact that it made me determined to succeed after multiple, upon multiple deaths. I kept wanting to come back for more.”
Greg Vander Velde: “’Rainbow Six: Extraction’ left me feeling like our squad needed an extraction. We were leaving behind more characters than we were rescuing for a while there, slowly making character selection a little more difficult. But the better we got at working stealthily as a team the more the missions got a little more manageable. Overall, it’s a game that really pushes you and ideally your friends to work together as you grind through challenging levels filled with unique badies. I look forward to more sessions with my squad in this “Last of Us” meets Rainbow Six survival shooter.”
Piggybacking on some of what they’ve said, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction can be a very challenging game. It could very well be that all three of us aren’t very exposed to the Rainbow Six franchise, so the whole strategic/tactical aspect was very new to us. Even still, we all worked really hard as a team and what started as a mission we felt we could accomplish, it quickly can go sideways and end at any moment. There is a lot to like here, though. The operators are all different, some are better than others, but the more you use a specific one the more you can level them up. There are also tokens you can earn to improve your gear and overall, the experience of jumping into these three-tiered missions can be very exhilarating and fun.
Having said all of that though, there are a few things that didn’t gel with me. When failing a mission and your team essentially dies (more like gets covered in foam and waits to be rescued) you are unable to use that specific operator for a good amount of time if you don’t jump right back in and manage to rescue him. This results in a situation where when you thought you had the right operators picked out to complete the mission with your team, all of that goes out the window and you need to re-strategize all over again and come up with something different. For three gamers who aren’t very weathered in this specific first-person shooter genre, that could be a heavy toll to take on. Another thing I didn’t care for was how long it takes to gain milestones, points to accumulate and unlock other maps. The system itself I believe is fine, but the amount of grinding we as a team had to go through was a bit rough.
All of my issues aside, there is a lot of quality here. Playing Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction on the PS5 was very smooth and I didn’t notice any glitches…and that’s really impressive! The missions may get repetitive and stale over time for some. For a very reasonable starting price of $40 dollars, I think they were smart to cut the cost with the lack of a lot of what some of us hope to expect in games like this, such as a campaign. Fans of the franchise, I think, will appreciate what Ubisoft Montreal was going for with this iteration and I’m sure they’ll be a lot better at playing it than we were.
7.5/10
Check out the Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction Lore Trailer:
For more information, visit: https://www.ubisoft.com/en-us/game/rainbow-six/extraction
Gaming since I was given an original Nintendo as a kid. I love great storytelling and unique ingenuity. When both collide in a single game, I'm a happy gamer. Twitter/IG @NickNavarro87
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