Rainbow Six Extraction Review

ign.com:

In one recurring mission in Rainbow Six Extraction, your Special Ops veteran is transported into a hellish parallel dimension where they face off against a malignant, mutated facsimile of one of your fellow Operators from the Rainbow Six Siege cast. An armored, multi-tiered health bar appears across the top of the screen, and it depletes as you dump clip after clip of ammunition into their scaly carapace. It is a cosmic, apocalyptic boss fight, and it’s hard not to think about just how far this series has strayed from its once-dogmatic faithfulness to gritty Navy SEAL realism. In Extraction, Ubisoft successfully brings the series to its wildest frontiers yet, but while this high-stakes co-op creates thrills out of the gate, it doesn’t seem to have the same staying power as its competitive cousin.

Extraction does make a meek attempt to justify its science fiction: There are some short cutscenes hovering around the margins and an unwieldy codex overflowing with flavor text that explain the massive onyx obelisks that protrude from the ground all over the globe. Some are the size of skyscrapers — one impaling the Statue of Liberty — and they've unleashed a band of zombified parasitic aberrations annoyingly dubbed the "Archæans," which were first introduced in the 2018 Outbreak limited-time event in Siege. Those same heroes have been deployed to hold the line, and as a party of three, a party of two, or by yourself, you delve deep into the fetid underbelly of this grotesque insurgency. It is pure pulp – body horror blended with steely tactics – and as someone with an appreciation for Rainbow Six's sillier side (like its two trips to Las Vegas) I relished the chance to steep into this bizarre new world without asking too many