Rainbow Six Extraction review – Siege mentality

metro.co.uk:

The first new Rainbow Six game in over six years focuses on co-op and fighting aliens, but it still has plenty in common with Siege.

Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six franchise has seen a lot of change since the first game was released in 1998. It started off as a slow-paced tactical shooter, where you had to plan out your missions on a map before even getting your finger on a trigger, but has slowly segued into more action-orientated territory. Extraction is the first major Rainbow Six iteration since 2015’s Siege and while the basics are similar the alien adversaries are not.

Whereas Siege put Rainbow Six on the map as an esport, pitching teams of five human players against each other, Extraction is a three-player co-operative game that has more in common with the likes of Back 4 Blood and Aliens: Fireteam Elite. The aliens in Extraction are called the Archaeans and they come in various forms which approximate the sorts of enemies usually found in a zombie game.

Rainbow Six Extraction’s premise is built on the sudden arrival of the Archaeans via a space probe, which crash lands in a remote US town, before they spread underground and drive up tendrils through buildings in various American cities, creating no-go areas. The Rainbow team – renamed REACT – is sent in to both clear areas of Archaeans and gather the intel and biological samples required to work out how to get rid of them on a more permanent basis.

In gameplay terms, this manifests itself as an extensive array of three-stage missions. Every map you’re sent into is divided into three sub-zones, with airlocks between them; each sub-zone has a specific objective, and if things are going badly for you and your team at any point, you can call for helicopter extraction. That means