Rainbow Six Extraction Review

"Alien Encounters"

Campaign

January 19, 2022 at 7:33pm
By Jason Stettner

This is a spin-off experience from Rainbow Six Siege with a focus on PVE action. You’ll be tackling a range of scenarios as a team of up to three members. You can choose to go solo, and they will definitely give you a shaming cinematic if you do.

The story is light, or well basically non-existent outside of grindy info drop stories that you can work towards. That’s a lot of the game, some grind type scenarios where it takes quite awhile to unlock a new area or in general to progress which makes it feel like a complete pain at times. It’s fun for sure, but repetitive is a word I’d use to define this one.

It’s well polished and provides plenty of content in terms of maps. It just feels like they’ve created artificial blocking barriers to force you to get extra time out of it and I feel that impacted my enjoyment of what it had to offer. Still, you can get some good time out of this one if the core loop works for you.

In general, you’re tackling these maps that have rotating chunks in regards to how you enter them. The map layouts are the same, but the objectives rotate. Those objectives could have been more varied as that’s the real part that gets old fast. The most annoying one is freeing an agent that you’ve lost, which is a whole mechanic in this.

You die, fail a mission or some combination of that and they’ll have low health so you have to use the whole roster. Then you can save some of them early and pull them from a parasite tree, it’s kind of annoying. There are other objectives, stabbing nests or taking out an enemy and numerous things along those lines. It’s fairly straight forward and every so often within new areas a fresh objective will get sprinkled in.

Gameplay

If you’re coming from Rainbow Six Siege this game plays the exact same. It’s had some visual upgrades applied to it but it’s essentially the exact same experience. You have tactical movement options and it’s not necessarily a game about fast dashing. This is more in lines with slowly moving through environments, deploying stealth to remove obstacles that get in your way. The whole block walls and windows mechanics return, but are rarely used if ever.

The only neat aspect of that is seeing the parasitic monsters breaking through wood walls. The play spaces are decently large, varied in terms of visuals and offer some variation within their setup which is nice. You get a wide range of operators, but few of them have helpful gear to handle the particular situation.

You do level them up to improve skills, and that can help a tad. This is quite brutal in terms of difficulty, so keep that in mind. There are four tiers and at any these creatures can give you a run for your life. On Xbox Series X you can two performance options, both run at 60fps. I would suggest the resolution selection since it looks much better and looks great.

The Conclusion

Rainbow Six Extraction is a generally solid experience, but also a repetitive one that can feel quite grindy at times. I definitely wanted to see quicker unlocks and map roll outs. I spent something like twenty hours and stuff was still getting locked away. You even lose some XP for failing objectives and it can just come across as a pain that you might want to just put away. I liked the game, the coop was fun and it has potential.

The maps do feel varied enough to keep things somewhat fresh, but the same objectives over and over can be quite maddening after awhile. It’s neat, it’s tactical. If you played Siege and like the mechanics you might find this PVE setup to be intriguing. For others, it’s a neat cooperative time that does provide some value despite having very simplistic core loops of gameplay.

Read our Rainbow Six Siege Review
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Rainbow Six Extraction Review on Xbox Series X
Review Code Provided by Ubisoft

Rating Overall: 7.4