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There are so many things that Rainbow Six Extraction does well. The times when it’s clicking, players feel the intensity and the satisfaction of victory. When it’s not smooth sailing, though, the warts are bad enough to make reasonable players decide to put down the controller and try something else.
10 Loved: The Single-Player Experience
Nobody could have expected the single-player mode in a squad-based game to be any good, but it is! Among other activities players are shocked they can participate in, many thought the game would be impossible to tactically conquer all alone.
Thankfully, the game reduces the difficulty, objective difficulty, and enemy quantity when playing solo. Not having to hear random players on chat yelling and playing guns blazing or quietly, there’s no shortage of enjoyment for those who queue up by themselves.
9 Hated: The Multiplayer Experience
There are incredible FPS games that have been lost to history for a variety of reasons. If Rainbow Six Extraction ever gets put on that list, it’s going to be because the multiplayer experience is broken to bits. Coordinating with other players is tremendously difficult.
Games like Payday 2 carry on for years because a bad teammate can’t ruin the entire experience. But even extremely talented gamers that aren’t in a complete hive mind will find themselves losing on the easiest difficulty. For now, go single-player until things get matched and balanced.
8 Loved: Encouragement Of Style
There are a few core objectives that get randomly selected and then located on each map. They shift around, which is refreshing. Equally refreshing is the encouragement for players to tackle these objectives however they’d like.
Players can go in loud and proud, blasting apart anything and everything. Or they can take a quiet route and stealth all the way through the map. Most will do a mix of both and that works well. The best FPS games on Game Pass understand that players should be able to tackle the game the way that they would like and Rainbow Six Extraction nails this.
7 Hated: Lack Of Gun Options
Call of Duty and Battlefield have both taken it on the chin for cutting back on gun options in their latest installments. If those same critics look at Rainbow Six Extraction, they would be beside themselves with rage. The gun selection is limited per operator and not extensive to begin with.
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Even more appalling is how gun modifications are scarce to the point of irrelevance. Players can only adjust their foregrip, muzzle, and sights, none of which can be tweaked meaningfully beyond “silenced” and “unsilenced.”
6 Loved: Hot-Zone Variety
Many players don’t appreciate what goes into making a great co-op FPS game. With twelve small maps, it’s easy for gamers to think that mastering each location is going to be simple. But they’d be wrong. The objectives change locations every time.
In the rare event that players get the same objective on the same map, that’s no guarantee that it appears in the same place. Knowing the rooms on each map is a start, but no two plays are alike with revolving enemies and important locations.
5 Hated: Study Objectives
Successfully completing one objective as a team is hard enough. Now imagine trying to beat a map where each player is trying to also accomplish their own individual objectives. Sadly, that’s exactly what Rainbow Six Extraction demands.
Players progress through the story with “study” objectives that force the players to choose a certain piece of gear and then to use it on a particular enemy. This is often at the detriment of logic and what is good for the team. Worse, sometimes these enemies are very rare and might not be encountered even after twenty or more runs.
4 Loved: Operator System
With other FPS games abandoning a player choice system in favor of an Overwatch-style game where each character has unique abilities, hearing that Rainbow Six Extraction was doing the same reasonably made players skeptical.
Each character is given unique abilities that alter how the game is played. It’s subtle, each character does have the capability of being stealthy or quiet, so this addition feels more like an extra rather than taking something away. The best mobile FPS games would do well to learn this model.
Thankfully, it’s pulled off well.
3 Hated: Lack of Innovation
Aside from the operators, it would be a fair criticism to suggest that Rainbow Six Extraction is not much more than a reskin of Rainbow Six Siege. The latter was fun, so it’s not a bad model to mimic, but this is supposed to be a new standalone game, not a complex mod.
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This is bad news for Ubisoft as they already struggle to shed the public perception that their games are getting boring. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla had a historic number of players quit before the end and Far Cry 6, while fun, wasn’t exactly a mind-blowing change from Far Cry 5.
2 Loved: It’s On Game Pass
Game Pass is a must-have these days for gamers and it gets stronger with day one availability of Rainbow Six Extraction. Having a hyped-up game from a studio not usually affiliated with Xbox is a big win for subscribers.
The benefit goes both ways. This is not just good for subscribers, it’s good for the game. Having more players around to try out the game is a good networking mechanism. The community is going to be larger and stronger thanks to such an exciting title branching out to more players.
1 Hated: The Asking Price & Store
Those who got the Deluxe Edition and the REACT Pack will be out roughly $80. Is this an $80 game? Comparing it to other games in the genre, it’s about as pricey as Back 4 Blood and a bit more than the average cost. But up front costs are only part of it.
There is an in-game store that offers cosmetics in addition to this. Most games that rely so heavily on cosmetics take this away from the initial price but the Rainbow Six Extraction team decided to keep both the in-game and out-of-game purchases on the higher end of the pricing spectrum.
Rainbow Six Extraction was released on January 20th, 2022, and is available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.
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