It’s two days since the Archaeans made their presence felt in New York City, covering its familiar lines in a tar-like Sprawl and ripping humans up on sight. This being a Rainbow Six game, an elite REACT task force formed and sprang immediately into action, preparing its highly trained operatives for what they could expect in a ‘hot zone’ using bleeding-edge VR simulations that look and feel very much like a tutorial level in a video game. We might not understand these alien jerks yet, a team of serious people in a room full of screens agreed, but we’re not going down without a fight.
That was two days ago. 48 hours since Doc made his first steps into a hot zone and more or less immediately died of aliens, considered MIA. About 47.5 hours since Lion went in to retrieve him and also went MIA. And a day and a half since three other operators succumbed to the same fate. XP gained: 0. Progress made: nil.
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Being downed in the field in Rainbow Six Extraction matters. This was my least favorite thing about Ubisoft’s tactical 3-player PvE shooter for the first two hours. If your health hits zero and no one has a revive kit, you stay down and REACT’s anti-sprawl foam kicks in, encasing you in yellow goo, any XP earned on that mission trapped within your high tech chrysalis with you. The only way to ever play as that operator again is to return to the mission with someone else, find them and pull them out of a tree before three fleshy flowers drag them back in. Really. Rescue them and you get some of their character XP and overall story-furthering points back. Die trying and you lose that operator too.
I’ve since retrieved the seven operators I lost in the first two hours, and now I think this system is my favorite thing about the game. It summons not just the high-stakes missions of the series’ earliest games, in which the likes of Ding Chavez and Santiago Arnavisca stayed dead all campaign if they caught a bullet, but Shadow of War’s brilliant nemesis system too. Like Monolith’s game, dying here is the beginning of a very personal story and rescuing that character to watch your milestone level tick up and unlock another mission location is well worth the frustration of being downed in the first place.
Does it play like Siege, though? More than most games. There’s a lot of time spent operating camera drones, leaning around corners and shooting through walls, so in that sense its lineage is clear. But it feels surprisingly little like a spinoff of Ubisoft’s existing online shooter cash cow and distinct in its execution, even in a crowded co-op shooter space.
Roguelike elements infuse the stealth-focused missions, which task you with any combination of 13 different mission types, with semi-randomized elements. Those mission types aren’t in and of themselves all that thrilling – kill an elite, blow up some nests, press ‘interact’ on some scanners – and already feel limited in scope. But the way they’re structured, as a three-phase dungeon crawl with considerably more XP for each completed objective, is some smart multiplayer design.
Example: I’m dropping into Tenderloin, San Francisco. My three objectives are to destroy some aberrant nests, then rescue an operator I carelessly left here last time, then kill an elite. Those objectives are split into three zones, separated by one-way airlocks. All I really care about is rescuing Vigil, so I have to blow up the nests first just to get to phase two and reach the next zone. I go about it clumsily, taking damage from explosive Bloaters and staggering about with 17HP left. But I’ve come this far. No point turning back now.
I reach Vigil, locate the fleshy flowers I need to shoot in order to free him from the alien tree’s grip, shoot the Sprawl away from the floor to keep my movement speed up, and get him onto my shoulders. Sprinting for the extraction zone, I alert two Archaean Spikers, who duly reduce my health to an 8HP sliver by the time I’ve dispatched them and extracted Vigil. I’ve achieved what I came here to do. The extraction zone is right here. It would be absolute madness to move to the final zone and try to kill an elite just for the extra XP. Obviously that’s exactly what I do.
The gamble inherent to every round is what keeps Extraction compelling, even with a limited variation of mission types and a roster of locations that can just as often feel like interchangeable interior modules as impressively dark exterior scenes. And despite the visual design of the Archaeans lacking something original to discern them from every other shooter you’ve played since Halo, the overarching story is impressively whole cloth in its depiction of alien invasion.
That’s partly down to the sheer amount of time and effort Extraction puts into telling you about it. Not just through introductory cutscenes that establish the time-honored Tom Clancy tone, and where people with tremendous emotional restraint brief each other in bunkers, but out in the world too when you spot scenes that trigger a voice note from your handler back at HQ. You might learn that the water supply was cut off through the whole neighborhood after Archaeans took over a downtown hotel, or that despite the bloodstains of the guests there, no bodies have been found. It’s startling to have an online shooter telling you about its lore mid-round. There’s no room for it in a PvP game as tense as Siege, but here it never feels intrusive. Each time you see that magnifying glass icon that precedes some audio storytelling, the game’s saying ‘Hey – wanna hear a bit more about why you’re doing all this?’ Usually, you do.
Storytelling isn’t all retrospective, either. As you complete objectives in each mission location, starting with just three maps in New York City, REACT learns more about the Archaeans. The invasion moves to different locations, from San Fran to Alaska and beyond. Shady corporations become involved, inevitably. It seems superfluous – on paper, it is superfluous – but I still found myself enjoying its quasi-Michael Chrichton plotting. To my surprise, I’m quite invested at uncovering the mystery at this point.
There’s more love and attention evident in Rainbow Six Extraction than anybody might have guessed before its release, then. Lessons from Siege’s half-decade run (and counting) have evidently been internalized and applied. But as for whether Ubisoft’s new game can expect a community as passionate and inventive – and most crucially as dedicated in the long-term – is impossible to say.
Because in order to do so, Extraction needs more content. And I’m sure more content is what we’ll get – but reviews aren’t written based on assumptions. What we have in lieu of more content right now is higher difficulty levels which dole out ever-larger XP bonuses, incentivizing visits back to familiar territory.
The most dedicated players will hit milestone level 30 and reach the Maelstrom mode that’s been described by its developers as the endgame content. The levels here aren’t bespoke, but instead challenge you with completing nine objectives in a single run instead of three. That’s plenty hard right now, as is actually leveling your operators to a stage where they can hope to be effective in Maelstrom rounds. But in a month of solid play? Two months? We’ll be parched for more.
What an impressive start this is, though. Who’d have guessed there really is more material to be found in shooting humanoid xenomorphs in the head and destroying their nests? Solid production values were a given from a triple-A developer of this caliber, but its luxurious audio design really adds to the gunplay. The sound of cracking an Archie from the other side of a wooden panel is gratifying on a molecular level, and the subsequent Skinner Box of itemized, color-coded XP bonuses that spills forth feels better than eating your DoorDash in bed. By keeping the difficulty high and the focus squarely on stealth, you’re guided into making use of each operator’s abilities, combining them thoughtfully and talking through objectives before rushing into them.
Perhaps the biggest barrier to gathering an audience big enough to warrant further content is that opening hour or two of Extraction, where every mistake feels severely punished and the little progress you make can be taken away in one clumsy fight. The VR tutorials might teach you the basic mechanics, but they don’t prepare you for the level of concentration required to actually complete a mission in one piece.
But if enough players come out the other side of that trial by fire, here’s a game that has interesting directions to evolve in. It’ll be helped along by Ubisoft’s ‘buddy pass’ system, which gives each owner of the game two free passes for their friends who can play free for two weeks as long as the owner creates a match and invites them. Oh, and if you see Vigil out there, stuck in a tree – bring him back for me, would you?
Looking for more like this? Check our list of the best co-op games.
Written by Phil Iwaniuk on behalf of GLHF.
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