Rainbow Six Extraction First Impressions on Xbox Series X and PC

Also notable right off the bat is the much more reasonable and sedate pace that Extraction has in comparison to Siege. Maps are larger and more diverse, including urban areas, warehouses, and open sections. Each mission includes three main objectives, but your team can extract at any time by heading to a pick-up point, just like in XCOM. Hence the title Extraction. The Archaeans are the bad guys, aliens of an unknown origin that are spreading across the world. One of your primary missions is to learn more about them, mostly by shooting them, naturally.

Unlike Siege and its handful of solo training missions, Extraction is perfectly suitable to solo play. The AI adjusts itself plus there are difficulty levels. Choose the easiest one (recommended for solo players from our experience), and you’ll get a very optimized game pace. Enemies won’t swarm you like in Back 4 Blood unless you cause too much noise or trouble, in which case a minor swarm may emerge. Swarms can be difficult to handle alone, and if you get downed, your operator doesn’t die, but rather becomes incapacitated and removed from the roster until, you guessed it, extracted from the hot zone. 

Rainbow Six Extraction brings back eighteen of the operators from Siege, acting as a sort of parallel universe or maybe a sequel. The timeline in which Extraction is set isn’t immediately clear. We assume the roster of operators will grow with time, but in any case we prefer to stick with our favorite, Yumiko Imagawa aka Hibana. As always, Hibana offers a good balance, covering close quarters, long range, stealth, and guns blazing. Of course, with Extraction the stakes can get high. There’s no recharging health, and if Hibana goes down for the count we need to play as other operators to go in and rescue her. We’ll do that for Hibana, but it’s not always easy, as the AI increases enemy difficulty and alertness in rescue situations as opposed to regular recon activity. Presumably because the aliens expect more humans to arrive and rescue their incapacitated comrade. 

The environments are almost as destructible as in Siege, meaning walls can be shot away and fall apart satisfyingly. There’s less emphasis on barricades, presumably because the aliens don’t follow the same logic human opponents would and are also much more powerful. They can break through walls if needed and require a lot more firepower and/or bullets to take down than anything in Siege.