Not everybody has a subscription for Xbox Game Pass, so whenever games like Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction get released, there are many people who are uncertain whether the release might be worth it or not. It surely comes from a big publisher, and the franchise is just as huge. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege even was a popular pick for esport tournaments, but how would the coop-focused game Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction be received by gamers? Is that something to pay money for?
First things first, I have an Xbox Game Pass subscription, so I didn’t have to purchase Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction just to give it a try. I was pretty hyped for this game even before I knew it would be in the Game Pass from launch day, so when it came out, nothing could stop me from giving it a try, and in this article, I want to share my thoughts with you. Also worth noting is that previously this title was known as Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Quarantine, but has been renamed due to recent developments.
Ever since Tom Clancy wrote the Rainbox Six novel in 1998, much has changed. Actually, the games that are released nowadays don’t have anything to do with the original story anymore. While for most games of the series, the focus was still on special counter-terrorism operations, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction is now about a sci-fi-esque kind of enemy. While it’s not entirely clear early in the game’s story what the enemy really is, the Ubisoft website simply refers to these creatures as “alien threat.”
Rainbow Six coop and PVE
So you are now teaming up with players from around the world to protect the earth from these curious invaders. Depending on how you play and who you play with, there could still be some strategic elements in the game, but I feel it turned into an action shooter pretty much, and, of course, that’s not a bad thing, but it doesn’t feel much like Rainbow Six.
Similar to previous installments of the Rainbox Six video game series, you can choose one out of several operators that you’d like to play with and can either play solo or team up with two other people in the multiplayer mode. Some of the operators have been around in Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege already, so fans are likely happy about their beloved characters making another appearance in this new game.
There are various locations and missions to play through, but while the marketing promises a high degree of “replayability,” I quickly found that many of the missions quickly feel repetitive. So the rest is grinding for gear and gadgets as you level up. Certainly, this is a very subjective aspect, and many gamers might not feel like that at all. Still, if you prefer complex storytelling and character development, you might not find it in Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction.
New innovation or unnecessary stress factor?
One more thing that I want to share is the stress that is introduced with operators getting injured or ending up MIA. May it be your own fault or an unlucky move of one of your teammates, it can be that your operator does not return with full health or might even become MIA (missing in action). How does that impact your play? Once an operator is injured, you will no longer be able to choose them to play missions until they are recovered. Even worse for the MIA operators who will need to be retrieved from the area of operation where they were previously lost.
This means that you cannot always play with the operator you like the most, which severely impacts your options to practice your play and strategy. While recovering, an MIA operator might just take an extra mission of about 10 minutes, they’d still return in their injured state, and it takes a lot of time for them to recover fully. How fast operators heal is up to how well or how poorly you play missions. In the worst-case scenario, you keep having injured and missing operators, and of course, you’ll not do any better with the operators at the bottom of the line, which are not much leveled up simply because you don’t like them perhaps. A bit more XCOM than needed in Rainbow Six perhaps.
And what happens if all your operators turn MIA? Will you need to call it a day? No, there is a sort of failsafe from Ubisoft that they included, but it’s simply the bare minimum. If all your operators are MIA, the one who went MIA the earliest will be returned and recovered. So you cannot really permanently fail at the game, which makes sense. If you want to really make sure that your operators heal over time rather than relying on this mechanic, you can do excursions and, with luck, do well on completing the objectives without getting injured. With an averagely positive mission completed, you can get injured operators about ten health points back, and they need to recover a total of 100 health points for being fully healed.
So it will take about 15 minutes (guess on average mission time) multiplied with 10 (give or take) to have the operators heal up fully. That’s just a vague rule of thumb, but the end of the math is that it will take about 150 minutes of playtime to recover agents like that. This is possibly not a very appealing aspect to all players who just want to play their favorite operators and get really good at playing them. But maybe I’m wrong, and many will enjoy this new kind of stress because it feels a bit more realistic, and it adds a sort of penalty for making mistakes.
Is Rainbow Six Extraction worth it?
So what’s the verdict like? Is Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction worth buying? I can only give you a personal opinion here really, but I suppose that a game review mostly comes with an opinion, and I hope you don’t mind my blunt assessment. In my opinion, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction should have been a DLC for Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege and is by no means a full stand-alone game. Therefore I think that offering this new release for the price of a new AAA title is a bit too much for what it is. The digital standard version costs about 50 bucks, and if you have no means to test this out a few hours before making a purchase, I suggest you to have a look at some Let’s Play videos or check out the streams on Twitch to better understand what this is like before buying.
YouTube: Rainbow Six Extraction – Official Gameplay Overview Trailer
Photo credit: All images shown are owned by Ubisoft and were made available for press usage.
