RAINBOW SIX SIEGE
Hands-on with all-new levels in Ubisoft’s explosive squad shooter
I will protect this bathroom with my life. In 40 seconds, five SWAT dudes are going to C4 their way into the twostory house we’re defending. For the entirety of that time, one-hundred percent of my focus is on figuring out the best way to fortify a toilet. My team has to defend a hostage, an AI-controlled character we can’t allow to be captured. This round, that hostage has spawned in the master bedroom, which happens to be adjacent to the now tactically-significant lavatory on the second floor. The odds that I’ll fire a submachine gun while standing in a bathtub are as high as they’ll ever be.
I need to work fast to put up defenses. My character, Castle, carries two bulletproof barricades, his special equipment. I hold F to stamp the barrier to one of the wall segments, and it stretches upward and downward like a giant steel accordion to reach floor to ceiling. Down the hall, Smoke, our gas expert, is erecting standard wooden barriers over doorways. Pulse lays his final spool of barbed wire in the kitchen. The pre-match clock shrugs off its last few seconds while we’re still finishing.
Defensive prep is one of my favorite phases of Rainbow Six Siege because it makes me feel like I’m in an R-rated Home Alone. Every trap or defense we lay is a deterrent to entering a specific room, a soft counter to certain types of executions. If we do our jobs right, these defenses will pare down the number of angles that the attackers can hit us from. If we spread our resources too thin or fail to use them toward a shared strategy, we may as well have set up paint-can pendulums or broken Christmas ornaments to stop special forces.
Siege’s defensive phase tells me that Ubisoft understands that it needs to be meaningfully, mechanically different to the multiplayer FPSes that have dethroned Rainbow Six during its seven years of dormancy. And while it’s concerning that Ubisoft has shown just two maps and one mode of a game that’s meant to release this year, every round I’ve played of it has left me wanting more. Siege’s values—awareness, communication, planning, intensity, fidelity—resonate with every bone in my competitive-FPS loving body.
Operation: Operators
What’s equally exciting is that you may not need to have love for Counter-Strike or Quake III in your skeleton like I do to appreciate what Siege is about. Siege is a shooter, but none of the battles I’ve fought in it have been won solely on aim. The maps are exclusively indoors, and (unless they’re revealed later) there are zero scoped weapons.
Victory hinges on your team tactics, positioning, what tools you choose to bring to a fight and when and where you apply them. That begins at the character selection screen that precedes each round. Here, each player picks an operator and their equipment. These 20 specialists generally pull from the same pool of weapons—submachine guns, shotguns, assault rifles, pistols—but each has a piece of special gear. Mute, a defender, throws out jamming devices that look like high-end wireless routers to block remote-controlled drones and prevent remotely detonated devices from triggering. Rook deploys a bag of armor for his teammates to pick up. Sledge smashes through light
barricades with a single swing of his hammer. Or you can play as a recruit, who lacks a special ability but picks from a wider range of basic gear—recruits were the only operative I saw who could carry a ballistic shield, for instance.
Which operators your team picks changes the texture of your tactics, but not so much that I’d call Siege a class-based game. That’s good: for the most part, the focus is still squarely on pure, breach-and-clear maneuvers and decision making, not item gimmicks. Mute’s jamming devices can stop nearby breaching charges from detonating, for example, but Sledge’s hammer or a few grenades don’t give a damn about his fancy technology. Use Mute’s jammers in conjunction with Castle’s bulletproof barricade, though, and you’ll have a surface that’s really tough to crack. “That combination together is very, very good, and we’re seeing a lot of people use it and its been working out pretty well,” Andrew Witts, game designer on the destruction system, tells me. “But at the same time, there’s a pretty good combo on the attack side that can just kind of break that defense entirely.”
In my best round as Smoke, I separate myself from my team on defense and creep up into the third, uppermost level of the massive passenger plane we’re guarding the hostage in. I’m lurking, four or five rooms away from the protective reach of my teammates’ eyes, ears, and guns. I peer down a box-shaped hole in the floor just as two enemies step into the frame.
Because attackers almost always know where the hostage is once
Siege’s combat phase starts, getting a bona-fide drop on them like this is rare. And nostril-dilatingly satisfying. I unload half a magazine and backpedal away. No kill notification pops up on-screen, but I’m pretty sure I incapacitated him—I saw a few shots connect with his back and calves.
I hurl Smoke’s gas charge down the hole and jab the middle mouse button again to detonate. Tense seconds pass as the gas hisses out—it does damage over time, and my hope is that it’ll block any of my victim’s friends from reviving him. Another six seconds, and a kill notification appears with my name on it. It worked! I scuttle back to our ring of defenses, mentally fist-pumping the whole way in the knowledge that my good luck and good timing has thrown the attackers off-stride.
Time bomb
Siege’s three-minute clock is a key ingredient to the game’s fun, and I
You know they’re in the next room, but not where
say that as someone with a distaste for arbitrary time limits in games. Having a single life and three minutes to live it means that mundane decisions, such as which door you choose to enter from, become quite meaningful.
Every second counts. An extra 40 ticks are tacked on for the defensive setup and scouting phase, where the attacking team drives tiny, remotecontrolled drones to locate the hostage and get a look at the configuration of obstacles in their path. When I first played Siege last June at E3, I was skeptical that the attackers’ godlike ability to spy on the defenders’ every move at the beginning of each round made Siege a better competitive game. It seemed too easy to spot the unprotected window or blind spot and exploit it.
I’m much less sour on this aspect of Siege after playing it more. I’ve grown to like the way that scouting acts as a micro-skirmish before the real encounter. Because the attackers’ drones can be destroyed, the defenders also have to focus on denying as much information as possible during the first 40 seconds. You can assign someone to hunt drones, but that means you’ll have one fewer body putting up barricades and barbed wire. On the other hand, will those defenses have much of an impact if the enemy already knows exactly where they are, and where your guns are pointed? It’s excruciating to watch a drone slip through your feet just as you put up a barricade.
Being a good scout can be equally tough. In one round on Siege’s Plane map, too many of our drones were destroyed and we failed to find the hostage. But we’d spotted two or three defenders (and their obstacles) near the cockpit—we were positive they were bunkered there. We meticulously cleared the top floor of the plane, spamming SMG fire through walls as we spent a breaching charge to crack open a conference room, one of the four possible hostage areas. We burst in as the dust cleared, ready to fight. No one was there. Whoops.
With a minute and a half left, we had no choice but to sprint downstairs, where pristine defenses awaited us. They had rifles primed behind steel half-walls, a deployable bit of cover, and we didn’t have enough gear left to poke holes in their barricades. We didn’t notch a single kill.
House of shards
It’s worth underlining what an intricate, high-fidelity destruction system Siege has. To break a wooden barrier with melee, I have to target unbroken spots of wood three times before the whole thing crumbles. If I’m shooting naked drywall, I can carve holes with my gun to peek through. “Destruction is the means [by which] you exercise your creativity, in terms of tactics,” says Witts. “It’s what makes new navigational opportunities for you, breaching a wall, bypassing a chokepoint that’s really locked down and forging a new path to the objective. Or blowing a hole and gaining an unexpected line of sight ...Destruction really falls into the center of our gameplay experience.”
Despite this, I wouldn’t label Siege’s weapon handling as realistic. Bullet and explosive damage does degrade based on how many layers of material an attack has to pass through. Witts tells me: “if you hit drywall and then the wooden stud [within the wall] and manage to make it through and manage to also penetrate the drywall the other side, the damage you’re gonna do to a player is gonna be X percent less because it’s calculating all those layers.” Damage drops off as bullets travel a further distance as well.
This often translates to a tense guessing game when you’re on the opposite sides of a wall with an enemy. You know they’re in the next room over, but not exactly where, or whether they’re prone or moving. If you miss your blind shot, the hole you just made in the wall is the only bullseye they’ll need to return accurate fire and their bullets could do full damage if they shoot clean through it.
It’s a pleasantly intricate system with interesting risks and rewards like this, but I also didn’t expect
Siege’s destruction tech to be so damn sensual, a lot of which is owed to its sound design. When you bash a wooden barricade, there’s a reflexive, twig-like snap interrupted by a cascade of clunky, hollow balsa sounds, like the cheapest IKEA
I didn’t expect it to be so damn sensual
dinner table being thrown down a flight of stairs. When I fire Ash’s M203-style breach launcher, there’s a clink of metal-on-metal as the ’nade spits out, then a high-pitched whirr as the bomb burrows into the wall, followed by the plastic click of a new cartridge slotting in. Even when a breach goes wrong, the particle and sound effects that surround it are downright enjoyable.
Siege’s audio fidelity makes listening a skill, but one piece of operator equipment undermined the need for using my eyes and ears to spot shadows and footsteps. The first time I play as Pulse, I find a safe spot in the cargo area of the plane and whip out his heartbeat monitor, a boxy gadget that stows my shotgun as I equip it. The viewfinder’s deep-purple screen takes up about a third of my monitor, and through this window I can see enemies through walls in real-time, each player represented by a floating heart icon. A minute into the round, still five-on-five, I see one of the hearts creep slowly up to the wooden barrier we’d placed to block, and shout to my teammates to blast through the barrier. Easy kill.
It felt great that my information directly led to a kill, and that my teammates had to trust me to open fire—if they missed, degrading the barrier with bullets might compromise their position.
In retrospect, it felt a bit unearned. I hope Ubisoft adds a cooldown to the heartbeat monitor in the finished game, because as it stands it’s an always-available wallhack with a 20-meter range.
In other respects, Siege is a game permeated by tense uncertainty. Because clear lines of sight are so hard to come by, you never truly know when, where, and how an enemy will strike. And when a barricade cracks, or a breaching charge goes off, the urgency you feel to report this new, essential information to your team is exhilarating. It’s a wonderfully deliberate FPS, one defined more by your decisions than your reflexes.
But there are tons of unanswered questions. There will be more multiplayer modes than the one Ubisoft has shown, but we don’t know what form they’ll take. Siege is said to have a singleplayer and co-op campaign, but zero details have been released. It’ll be essential to have smart, skill-driven matchmaking.
Some smoke still needs to clear, but Siege has already made a solid impression on me. The threeminute tactical vignettes it writes are simultaneously intense, disposable, and memorable. If Ubisoft can overdeliver on maps, use pre-release to demolish bugs, and continue to make multiplayer the centerpiece, I think this format of FPS will find a big audience among SWAT wannabes and casual types alike.