Entertainment
AWOL for eight years, the thinking man’s shoot er returns to rotat ion with a current-gen makeover
It’s all go this month, with Rainbow Six: Siege sorting out your gaming needs, an app that could negate you having to go to the gym ever again, and a must-hear live album from Nine Inch Nails and David Bowie
With so many modern shooters opting for dull futuristic settings and giant robots, it seems fitting that it should be Rainbow Six – the Tom Clancy-licensed franchise of yore that turned counterterrorism into a fine art – that’s kicking the genre up the backside and taking things back to basics.
It’s an admirable mission statement, and one that makes for one of the most user-driven gunplay masterpieces of recent years – but that stripped-down ethos comes at a price...
Despite having the Rainbow Six name above the door, Siege drops a lot of the features series veterans may be expecting. Gone are the pre-mission planning sessions where you plotted your breach into a terrorist-held stronghold, dividing your teams based on their skillsets and behaviours. It was a joy to play with AI, and even more rewarding online, so seeing these seemingly vital elements removed altogether takes a lot of getting used to. Is this still a Rainbow game? Without a doubt, but it’s one that needs to be perceived through the prism of modern gaming tastes and trends to be understood. This is a shooter for the hair-trigger gamer who wants instant satisfaction and just enough planning to feel suitably tactical. It sounds trite but these base principles create emergent gameplay experiences straight out of user choices and reactions. It’s brutal and unforgiving, but when it clicks, it really clicks.
There are no single-player campaigns anywhere in sight, and the entire experience has been rebuilt around revolving rounds of asymmetric shoot-outs. Out goes regenerative health (and good riddance). Pick-ups and perks? Be gone, foul demons. It sounds bare, and it is – starkly so – but spend just an hour or two in the game’s tactical bosom with a headset on, and you’ll realise that the idiom ‘less is more’ has never been truer.
Siege cycles through a number of different game types (variants of disarm/protect the bomb, and capture the flag/hostage, are all present), but it ultimately all boils down to this: if you’re defending, barricade everything, lay some tripwire bombs and hide in a corner. If you’re an attacker, use a tiny two-wheeled drone to seek out the objective, mark enemy combatants and, well… attack.
From either side of the fight, the air of tense build-up and eventual explosive confrontation is so palpable, you find yourself almost sweating after the dust settles. As defenders, there’s a satisfying tactile power to reinforcing walls against breach charges and erecting makeshift barriers around hostages. As the attacking team, there’s nothing like spying