Rainbow Six Extraction Review: Not Even for Rainbow Six Siege Diehards

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Rainbow Six Extraction, first and foremost, is an extension of a well-established IP. Following early disappointment and massive amounts of developer support, Rainbow Six Siege — the series' online-only reboot launched in 2015 — has outlived all of Ubisoft's expectations and become a multi-year ongoing game (dubbed games-as-a-service in industry parlance). As of two Decembers ago after launching on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X, Rainbow Six Siege registered 70 million players across all platforms. On one hand, that's why there hasn't been a new Rainbow Six game for over six years now. On the other hand, a new title (that appealed to a different gamer market) has seemed inevitable. And that's what we get with Rainbow Six Extraction, out Thursday globally.

Drawn on the time-limited Rainbow Six Siege game mode Outbreak, Rainbow Six Extraction is a spin-off in principle. It brings Six Siege's roster of characters — or Operators, as they are known — to Extraction and thrusts them into an alternate reality where they must tackle an alien race known simply as the Parasite. As you can immediately tell, Rainbow Six Extraction is not a player-vs-player (PvP) experience unlike its mainline cousin. It's now a co-op player-versus-environment (PvE) game, with squads of up to three players being sent into arenas to complete a series of objectives. There's no campaign though — no narrative or connective tissue, just a bunch of levels that you revisit over and over, which ultimately felt artificial and manufactured to me.

The wait continues for those wanting another Rainbow Six title with a proper single-player campaign—the last of those was Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 that released in 2008. As many years between that and the launch of