Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Extraction Review

The initial cutscene explains what has been happening to Earth (read: America), but the gist of it is that gooey aliens erupted from the lithosphere (science for ground) and are destroying our planet. Think of Venom from Spider-Man, and you’ll pretty much understand the biology of Archaeans. Yes, Archaeans is what they’re called by the REACT team, which is short for Rainbow Exogenous Analysis and Containment Team.

That’s pretty much what you’ll get in terms of lore from Extraction. Everything else is heavily dependent on the cooperative shooter gameplay elements and your willingness to play beyond the first few hours.

It’s in the same world as the Rainbow Six Siege, and if you’re familiar with that game then the operators won’t be news to you. The lore is pretty much an extension of the Six Siege game with the same operators being deployed to deal with the alien invasion.

This is a tactical co-op PVE shooter where up to three players are deployed to interconnected maps with procedurally-generated objectives. At the core of it, it’s taking Rainbow Six Siege’s tactical cooperative shooting and mixing it with a hint of zombie shooting elements. Unlike the other shooters in this genre where you feed bullets to the hungry undead, in Extraction, you must learn to navigate the area, complete the objectives and then move on to the next zone of the map. 

Each map is divided into three zones and in each zone, you must complete one objective and then move on to the next zone to complete the next objective. Each zone will have increasing difficulty with more and tougher Archaeans spawns, and tighter mission objectives.

Most of the objectives are repetitive. Like killing mini-bosses, extracting specimens, extracting VIPs, collecting data and stabbing enemies from behind to collect some more data, bombing spawn points, etc. You get the idea, right? Here’s the kicker though, if your operator is downed in battle you cannot just simply respawn or go back to base with them. They enter a cryo-state which protects them from becoming Archaean food. Then you must deploy back with another operator and rescue your fallen operator to get them back into your roster. This is absolutely fantastic and adds a sort of unwavering tension no matter what mission you’re on. There’s always that threat of losing an operator.

Losing an operator has deeper consequences than just a missing character from your roster. Each operator has unique skills which are the same as Rainbow Six Siege. And losing one of those operators can really dent your approach to a mission. Some missions require the utmost commitment to stealth, while others might need you to come with all the health kits and armour. Depending on what missions you get, choosing the right operator is key to making out of the three zones with success. 

You can, at any point in the game, just run to the extraction zone without completing the mission and live to fight another day. This sense of fight or flight is often a lingering thought while progressing through the missions because whatever damage your operator takes, it’s permanent. Yes! So not only does your operator go out of business if they get whacked to the bone, but also whatever damage the operators take can only be recovered from resting them for a couple of missions. So the game naturally pushes you to try different operators at all times.

Rainbow Six Extraction has some of the most clever gameplay mechanics that can make it great, but unfortunately it gets boring very quickly. There’s only a limited amount of fun to be had before it gets stale from shooting enemy AI. Even the environments and maps are drab and boring. None of these maps leave an impression on you, and you won’t be able to tell them apart either.

Yes, you can keep looping in for the higher difficulty and to some extent the game encourages you to do so, but that really depends on whether you still want to engage with AI. Unlike Six Siege which pits you against human enemies and rewards you for playing skillfully and tackling unpredictable human enemies, Extraction doesn’t have that pleasure.

Although, if you really want to give it a go, it’s free on Xbox Game Pass for PC and Xbox players. So the admission fee is nominal if you’re on that subscription.