Rainbow Six Extraction takes the core concept of Rainbow Six Siege, flipping it from the competitive experience to a cooperative one. A purely PvE experience, you'll tackle some objectives (called “incursions”) in categories of as much as three people. Each of the areas you will be infiltrating is infested by the Archaens, and objectives tend to be more than simply killing them. Sometimes you will need to lure them back to some specific area. Other times you'll have to cross an interdimensional portal to defeat a strong boss. It's kookier than you'd expect for either Rainbow Six or Tom Clancy, but it's something different.
There remain twelve or so objective types. They're on such regular rotation that things rarely get as tedious as you'd expect these to.
After selecting an area to infiltrate, the game creates an incursion for you. Each incursion is split into three phases of increasing intensity, with a specific objective being allotted to each stage. The further into an incursion, the better the rewards, however the more difficult the approach. After each phase, you are able to decide to progress to the next one or “cut your losses” and extract. Extracting yields probably the most points, but going deeper is almost always tempting to promise more points. It's risk-reward in its purest form, and it's addictive enough that I rarely extracted after i should have.
When I talk about risk, it's not only losing how well you're progressing or points. Each of your operators you take into an incursion is at risk of being injured or missing in action. When you get downed and aren't rescued by your teammates, your character will be lost in that area until you revisit it. The next time you listen to it, one of the three objectives in the incursion is a rescue mission of sorts that'll add them back for your roster.
The kicker is the fact that all of your characters' won't count towards your rank until they're rescued. So, losing your best operator means will impact your team's level more than should you lose one you've barely used. Sometimes, it might be also more strategic to depart your partner behind during a mission as the chance of leaving the objective for rescue might be greater than the reward. It's these on-the-fly alterations in objectives and priorities where Rainbow Six Extraction really shines.
Thankfully, failure to rescue someone doesn't mean they're gone forever. While it could be a fun temporary twist, Permadeath isn't an element of Rainbow Six Extraction. Failure to rescue someone from their parasitic prison means they'll still go back to you, but with less xp. It feels like a relatively balanced method to punish sloppy plays without being needlessly cruel towards the player. It's so reasonable, in fact, that I'd want to jump straight back to a roadmap to rescue an operator as soon as I lost them and check out everything again.
Repetition and procedurally generated elements of games often leave me feeling short-changed or bored as things start to repeat endlessly. Extraction does a fantastic job at remedying this, drawing from a wide pool of variables – whether it is the Archaen you'll encounter or even the objectives themselves – to provide a unique incursion every time. It is the type of repetition that fosters addiction, and it is the main reason I usually kept Extraction feeling fresh, whether I had been succeeding or failing.
The Archaen themselves give a lot of spice to the proceedings. Amongst all of the types, they'll alert the others and nearby nests to create more if you're seen. These moments, though seemingly impossible, are survivable but will often make you crippled in some way or another. The enemy variety here's excellent – many will melee you, others take shots to you. Some could even explode when damaged, though they can damage fortifications you may set up too. Like mentioned previously, some even mimic other operators (like Sledge) in boss battle-like encounters.
When you gather everything that Rainbow Six Extraction does, it feels different from other PvE experiences on the market. So many of them are wave-based, action-packed thrillers that rarely need a true sense of strategy. Extraction feels more strategic in the approach. You can try to hurry run the amount, but you'll regularly be met with failure or severe crippling enough where you'll rarely reach the end of an incursion scot-free. Stealth is the name from the game here, as pulling off takedowns and headshots literally clears a path with the player-slowing sludge the parasite creates, enabling you to move without hindrance through the maps.
In relation to progression, I previously eluded the way the game handles your rank. The stronger your roster, the stronger your rank. Successful extractions with bigger groups also multiply what exactly you restore along with you. Becoming an entirely PvE experience, Extraction's progression and rewards aren't merely cosmetic. You'll unlock new gadgets, new weapons, along with other improvements that give the sport an almost rogue-like feeling of progression. There are still cosmetic customisations, most of which can be purchased with real cash, but nothing feels egregiously grindy. I'd usually see myself trying “just one more” incursion to see what I'd get next. However, the lack of grind does cause me to feel wonder what will happen when players get to the end of the extremely achievable progression tree.
Enter the Maelstrom Protocol. Rainbow Six Extraction's endgame mode remixes pretty much everything, offering weekly assignments with specific operators that are tougher than previous engagements. During the time of writing, it was difficult to grasp what Maelstrom Protocol appears like beyond its first week. Still, her potential to lengthen the replayability and replay value of Extraction well beyond that which was initially expected.
While Rainbow Six Extraction achieves this much right, there are some niggles I experienced within my time with the game. Less seriously, we quite often encountered a glitch where holding a button to bring back a teammate wouldn't work correctly. Whether this resulted from a congested connection or perhaps a simple glitch has yet to be seen. More subjectively, Extraction doesn't really put its best foot forward when playing solo either. Perhaps this is a moot point considering that farmville is ostensibly designed for multiplayer, but it is worth mentioning for anyone who wants to tackle everything by themselves.
From a presentation standpoint, Extraction doesn't break much new ground, if any. From a technical perspective, Extraction is a very dark affair. However, it uses this darkness to offer some moody lighting that is disappointingly not really good as it may be due to a distinct insufficient HDR. That being said, the artistic direction and musical score are both fantastic. The parasite and it is surroundings feel genuinely alien, and wading with these dark and infested worlds the very first time is a true treat.
All in all, we're able to argue about precisely how Tom Clancy or Rainbow Six the experience Extraction offers is, but at the end of your day it's a remarkably strong if not modest PvE experience.
