Rainbow Six Extraction review: More quarantine needed

At first glance, Rainbow Six Extraction sounds like an excellent proposition. Take a bunch of grounded operators from Rainbow Six Siege and build a standalone expansion to the popular limited-time Outbreak event from 2018 where you’re fighting waves of increasingly trickier alien foes. Make it cooperative instead of competitively focused, keep the player count to three to make it easier to find games, and you’re off to the races.

The thing is, Rainbow Six Extraction’s warts start to show from very early on. For starters, this may as well not have a story, which is odd considering how Siege’s operators have gone from two-sentence bios to fully fleshed-out characters with dedicated fan followings. There’s an opening cutscene and you’ll get the odd additional cutscene when you reach certain Milestones (XP ranks), but that’s about it.

Everything else feels built around short-lived heavily gamified experiences that it starts to feel strange that Rainbow Six Extraction is closer to full price than not. There are four locations, each separated into three main maps, which are then divided into three sections. That doesn’t sound so bad on paper, but you’ll be revisiting all of these locales ad nauseam. It wouldn’t be so bad if these maps had more personality, but given they’re regularly covered in alien goop (called sprawl), they all start to look and feel the same.

To combat this all-too-frequent feeling of sameness, developer Ubisoft Montreal has employed the services of RNGesus to spice things up. When the randomised in-level elements are in harmony, they make for a compelling chorus of gameplay that incentivises stealth and ramps up the tension if you make a mistake or just randomly decide to go loud. There are a dozen or so objectives that you can be asked to complete, and their locations are randomised across the map.

Theoretically, that’s a great idea for avoiding monotony, but the RNG misfires as often as it hits the mark, which means you’ll soon discover your favourite objectives and least favourites that make you groan whenever their ugly heads re-appear for the umpteenth time. While enemy variety is solid, playing on higher difficulties—which is borderline essential to avoid even grindier gameplay and artificially elongated levelling up thanks to better XP gains, not to mention increased tension care of harder enemy types—means you’re frequently met with the more frustrating enemy types.

Tackled as an appropriately coordinated group with the right guns and gear, these foes can often be steamrolled. But when played solo with an operator you’re trying to level up, maybe testing a new gun or gear item, you’ll quickly find just how spongey these harder foes can be, even when you’re emptying dozens of bullets into their so-called weak spot. This gripe is highlighted with some of the spongiest foes outside of The Division when it comes to Rainbow Six Extraction’s boss fights.

The theory behind these bosses is actually great: taking on twisted forms of familiar operators in your roster. But in execution, there’s only a handful of them, they become incredibly easy and predictable to fight with no apparent mix-ups in how they attack, and you’ll empty magazine after magazine into them before they go down. How boring.

Speaking of operators, you’ll unlock them in groups for particular Milestones, which is a squandered opportunity given how they could have been spread out, so you have more meaningful unlocks in your pursuit of the Milestone 18 endgame content (more on that below). Certain operators feel like a good fit and fun to play from the start, while others make no sense, either because of low-capacity, high-recoil guns that feel out of place in this kind of PvE shooter, or because their abilities suck.

Fuze and Tachanka, for instance, are incredibly situational, with the former’s ability playing against the stealth tactics that are incentivised by extra XP rewards and the latter’s locked to a fixed spot, rather than his much-improved form in recent Siege (which would’ve rocked in Rainbow Six Extraction). Regardless of which operators you love or loathe, it takes a fair chunk of time to max them out at level 10.

The fastest way to upgrade both operator and XP rank is by completing studies, which amount to Achievement-like challenges that are critical for 100 percenting the four areas. It’s fine when the challenges are straightforward enough or incentivise you to try new operators or tactics. But other times the conditions of these studies are wholly dependent on RNG, which sometimes pushes you to max out the difficulty just to try and get the condition to pop so you can clear it.

If it doesn’t pop, you can get into the game and extract immediately, but that feels more like a frustrating waste of time. Had Ubisoft Montreal built these studies around tailored objectives with a natural progression, rather than early challenges feeling like they’re asking you to max out the difficulty or keep grinding to get the enemy you need to clear it, these may have felt less grindy and more satisfying.

When RNG is favourable and you’re playing Rainbow Six Extraction with two other coordinated mates on one of the higher difficulties, there’s some great fun to be had, with a map fully cleared in anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes. But when RNG is unfavourable, especially when you’re playing alone, the worst parts of Rainbow Six Extraction loom large and, like waiting too long in line at a hit-and-miss fast-food joint, you start to question why you’re investing so much time in something that probably won’t satisfy you.

Worse still is the relatively high asking price to play the game, coupled with an in-game store that wants you to hand over even more cash for cosmetic items. It begs the question why this wasn’t a premium, optional expansion for the Siege player base rather than a standalone thing that doesn’t feel like it can stand on its own two feet half the time.

Those with an Xbox Game Pass subscription have access to the game on day one, so that’s less of a gripe for them. But for everyone else, paying up to $79.95 for a game that frustrates as much as it delights, demanding you grind to get to the better parts of its gameplay loop, it makes the disappointing parts of Rainbow Six Extraction loom larger.

The platform you play on will determine the price you pay for Rainbow Six Extraction, with RRPs ranging from $59.95 on PC for the base version of the game to $89.95 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X for the Deluxe Edition. Rainbow Six Extraction is on Xbox Game Pass, for console and PC, so if you have an active subscription, that’s a far more cost-effective way to play. Check out the table below for the best Rainbow Six Extraction prices at the time of review:

Here are some of the most frequently asked questions about Rainbow Six Extraction: