Exam Information
Time played: 21 hours
Platform: ps5
Receiving a surprise from AAA video games seems increasingly rare the further you go into space. Usually, after years of speculation about early E3 announcements, teasers, trailers, breakdowns, interviews, and various marketing materials, you usually have a pretty good idea of what you're getting into when you finally start on the final product.
However, Rainbow Six Extraction is a real surprise. It's probably not the game you have in mind when you hear a cooperative alien shooter; those words tend to conjure up titles like Left 4 Dead, the model for the modern co-op shooter where you fight an existential threat. It would also make sense to make that comparison, as the genre seems to be somewhat hot with the recent Back 4 Blood reviving the genre and Redfall promising to bring more soon. It really felt like a co-op shooter full of Rainbow Six Siege characters fit that mold delightfully.
However, Rainbow Six Extraction is not like Left 4 Dead. Instead, what it offers is something much closer to XCOM, except when you play it, it's like an inflated horror hunt for the title's sister game, Rainbow Six Siege. If that sounds weird, you're right. Rainbow Six Extraction looks like one of the strangest AAA titles in a long time.
Rainbow Six Extraction price and release date
- What is it? A cooperative shooter based on Rainbow Six Siege that forces you to defend yourself against an alien threat.
- Release date? January 20, 2022
- What can I play? PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X / S, PC, Google Stadia
- Prize? €39.99 / €44.99 / AU$79.95
The game takes place in an alternate reality where an alien threat, the Archaeans, rises from the earth. The slimy parasitic creatures are grossly organic, leave a black slime everywhere, and have all sorts of creepy stalagmites and appendages that terrify the poor of the earth.
This is where REACT comes in. It's the organization you lead during the invasion, and the Rainbow Six Operators are its armed staff. The goal is to complete quests, learn more about the threat, and find a way to defeat the hostile visitors.
Perhaps the most impactful aspect for those looking for "Left 4 Dead with their favorite Siege Operators" is that you get a much broader view of REACT's efforts. Operators are tokens that you can use in place of characters you play as. While you take control of your choice of Operator in a mission, once you exit it, you manage it as if it were a resource. Operators must take breaks after missions to recover, and can even "die" on missions, causing them to become covered in foam and need to be rescued on another of their missions.
As you go on raids, you also learn more about the alien threat and unlock new technologies to use in the field. You run this effort that doesn't use brute force against the Archaeans, but rather precision missions to gain more information on your enemy. It is research instead of total war.
Once again, it's not hard to conjure up the specter of XCOM hanging over the game's structure. It's not that deep, but it's amazing. Is rare. He is, in his own way, a bit charming.
There isn't much trying to do what Rainbow Six Extraction intends. It's rare in AAA games, and it's easy to become rooted in the title as you try out new ideas, even if it can be clumsy when it comes to execution.
In the realm of screaming
However, it is more of the Rainbow Six Extraction package. The action on the field makes for a very strange bedfellow with the overall structure. Incursions, while playing like Siege, also has aspects of 4X games like XCOM, particularly in the way it attempts to create random encounters.
In a mission, you or up to two other teammates can land on one of twelve maps. Each of these maps has three sub-areas to navigate, where you complete one objective per area. Completing one will allow you to leave the subarea and move on to the next. If at any point you and your team feel like it's too difficult to complete the next objective, you can choose to be pulled early. This creates a clear look at risk assessment from one area to another which can be compelling, especially if your group suffered significant damage before in a raid.
While Rainbow Six Extraction isn't a pretty game and can be downright ugly at times, it does have a captivating atmosphere. Archeans look twisted, with a wide variety of menacing yet interesting bodies. Part humanoid, part fungus, part insectoid, his black slime spreading through the levels with a life of its own is unnerving.
It's for a good reason too. A mission can go awry with the slightest mistake, as Archaeans can hit hard and deliver various tricky shapes and environmental hazards. Sometimes it is difficult to sneak through the corridors of these infested places. That, combined with a pitch-perfect electrogothic soundtrack, helps create an atmosphere that elevates the whole above the sum of its parts.
busy work
However, the seams to how missions are randomized are obvious. All twelve cards can launch you into one area or another, but you'll still move through the same places bit by bit. The way you create missions is by using one of twelve set objectives. It can be anything from luring an enemy in for the kill, marking nests, activating a succession of gadgets, rescuing hostages, or sabotaging alien structures.
However, everyone feels busy. They look like Rainbow Six Siege-y targets that are on a map with aliens scattered everywhere. Because that's it. Completing the objectives feels like a checkbox to make you feel like a close neighbor to Siege, but that never makes the objectives particularly compelling.
It's good in a group and it's new how the game generates the objectives on the map. Yet while doing them, you never feel like you're defending yourself or learning about an alien threat. It's like you're on a busy map with video game-type objectives, like standing in one area until I tell you to stand in another area. Although each map is randomized, with new objectives each time, the experience never feels different.
These types of level builds are also a staple of the genre, but it's all too easy to see the seams here. There are no big story moments after fairly innocuous cutscenes to make things work. There's context for broader progression in the game, but it never feels tied to what you just did in a raid. Taking over areas doesn't feel like downloading key data, and capturing a specimen doesn't seem to advance research with extraterrestrial knowledge. All of these sound like minor goals to gain an indescribable experience to push a number of progress and reach the next milestone. Essentially, the game can feel like playing an endless series of side quests, rather than one cohesive experience.
crashing into the ground
This is the key problem at the heart of Rainbow Six Extraction. XCOM felt like it had a gripping story driving it; special missions to really bring home some great moments. There were also a bunch of different progress bars, and you decided how to handle them. If you invest poorly, you might stumble into a corner and realize you need to start saving all over again. Also, your best characters, even though they got stronger and stronger, were still deadly. They could be lost forever.
The absence of these kinds of stakes prevents Rainbow Six Extraction from realizing its lofty ambitions. No key moment in history draws you in. There is only one real progression track on which the whole experience flows. The worst thing your operators can do is disappear for a few missions and come back with a fraction of their progress. Just missing a sense of fallibility in this vision that feels like it's begging.
Verdict
However, none of this is to say that the game lacks merit. Again, Rainbow Six Extraction is amazing, weird, unique, and has decent potential. It's rare in AAA games and it's very easy to salute the spirit of the game.
The experience is charming and supportive, as well as repetitive and rambling. It has a lot of ideas, and it looks like the base of an idea ready to be expanded. If Ubisoft puts a lot of time and effort into it, it could turn out to be a fantastic experience. Being in charge of the operation to defend against an alien threat, which is also a cooperative first-person shooter built on the foundation of great competitive gameplay, has its place in the world.
If you or your team catch up or complete certain missions, it can even provide that nice zen that many repeatable side quests in games can provide. However, that's where it falls too.
It often feels like you're getting more and more appetizers while you wait for the main course that doesn't materialize in a timely manner. The final experience feels too marred by overly-simplified systems, a lack of cohesion in experience sales, and too immune to true failure that the game can often feel like operators are stuck in the goo that coats its levels.
With no exciting spikes, it all ends up being felt on a single note, and when it comes to leveling up and hitting progression targets, the allure that fueled the initial excitement slowly fades. Like the Archaeans at the heart of the game, the experience is strange, unique and fascinating but ultimately hard to connect with on a human level.
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