Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction
With a deadly parasite creeping across the USA, the latest shooter arms you with much more than a mask and a vaccine. But is it as effective?
R6
On the face of it, Rainbow Six Extraction has everything Clancy fans are looking for: strong gunplay, fabulously destructive environments, and a roster of unique Operators. The only trouble is, the rest of what makes R6 a hot favourite with shooter buffs – chiefly tactical PVP fights across intricate maps – is simply not there.
While there is an emphasis on online collaboration… well, that’s it, really. There’s no story campaign; in fact there’s no campaign at all. All you do is enter quarantine zones – either alone, with your pals or with matchmade randos – shoot shizz up, and do your damnedest to get back out again. Rinse and repeat.
Even the objectives you’re required to complete come from a limited pool. Selected at random from a dozen or so options, they’ll task you with rescuing somebody, or perhaps eradicating a clutch of poisonous nests. Occasionally you have to hold specific points while warding off intruders, and later you might need to silently take down a particular specimen in order to extract its DNA for scientists to analyse.
This means that sometimes you’ll have a great time – your objectives will be speedy and straightforward, and you’ll move seamlessly through the incursion zone – and others will feel like literal nightmares, with blackened goo sucking at your feet as you try to run for your life.
We suspect Extraction’s main issues stem from its core premise. Neither solely a survival horror nor a tactical shooter, it straddles both genres without committing seriously to either. If you’ve come into this looking for the hardcore tactics of other Rainbow games, you’re unlikely to come out of its formulaic ghost train feeling wholly satisfied.
But if you’re just happy with a gun in one hand and a stun grenade in the other, the combat is fabulous fun and the parasitic aliens you take on are a formidable, occasionally even unnerving foe.
Vikki Blake