that mostly spawn grunt enemies
became way too easy.
Things get a lot less balanced
when you crank it up to Severe or
Critical difficulty. With the heat
turned up, basic navigation becomes
a chore. Bigger enemies won’t go
down in a single shot to their weak
point, and even if you kill them fast,
they’ll still probably alert everything
within earshot and
kickstart every nest to
spawn more. There’s
seemingly no limit to
how many Archaeans
can spawn from a nest,
so if we couldn’t
destroy every nest
before that happened,
they’d pump out more
aliens than we could shoot.
This can get frustrating not only
because dormant and active nests
look and sound the same, but because
it basically doesn’t matter how well
we perform after a billion enemies
show up. Best case, we extract from
the mission early and take a loss,
which usually means a small enough
XP reward that it wasn’t worth our
time in the first place.
Back 4 Blood also had early
trouble with difficulty tuning.
Similarly, I think Extraction could use
some adjustments to enemy spawn
rates. What I’ve encountered feels
less like an AI director dynamically
deciding what we can or can’t handle
and more like an open faucet
randomly spewing out powerful
enemies unless we shut it off.
SPRAWL ABOARD
For how much of Extraction can be
confusing, it’s nice to tab over to the
operators and see a bunch of familiar
faces from Siege. Ubi has plucked 18
operators from its existing roster and
lightly modified their kits to suit alien
zombie murder.
Most operators slot in pretty well
to PvE action – Doc and Finka’s
healing tech and Rook’s armour
plates needed virtually no changes.
Others have been lightly tweaked,
like Pulse and IQ’s sensors, which
now detect nests and spare ammo
from a distance instead of heartbeats
and enemy gadgets. It’s cool to see
operators that I’ve never really jived
with in Siege become favourites in
Extraction. Alibi’s holographic decoys
are obviously pretty bleh in a PvP
setting with canny human enemies,
but they’re amazingly useful for
luring Archaeans away from me.
It’s a shame that most of the
operator gadgets (and side gadgets)
are only situationally useful. Hibana,
one of Siege’s most popular operators
thanks to her hard breaching pellet
launcher, is basically just a slower
way to throw an impact grenade in
Extraction. Jäger’s ADS turrets are
nice to take down a few enemies
before they blow up, but they’re too
slow and clunky to
deploy in a fight. IQ
can find ammunition
across the map, but it’s
not difficult to find
stuff without her.
Because of Extraction’s
high lethality, it was
hard for my squad to
justify bringing
operators who don’t contribute to
armour or health in some way.
Secondary gadgets have the same
problem. Ubi cooked up a bunch of
new throwables for the Archaeans,
like a scan grenade, a ‘glue’ trap that
slows enemies like the one in Prey,
and a literal forcefield that blocks
ranged attacks, but those were all
made instantly obsolete in my mind
when I realised a single impact
grenade can stun an enemy, clear
Sprawl from the area, destroy nests,
or destroy a wall between you and
your goal. There’s also a third slot
where you can equip extra ammo or
a drone, but those seemed like
needless luxuries when I could take a
self-revive kit or some extra body
armour instead.OUT OF EXTRACTION
As I slowly discovered with
Extraction’s mission variety, there’s
little to work towards once you
unlock operators. For hours I kept
pecking away at locations I’ve been
to, completing the same random
objectives in the same places,
wondering what I still stood to gain.
The answer is a bunch of cosmetics I
don’t care about and an endgame
mode called Maelstrom Protocol that
triples the normal number of
objectives to nine. After realising that
mode doesn’t sound remotely
interesting, I had run out of reasons
to play Rainbow Six Extraction.
That’s OK – I had around 20
hours of good times in a beautifully
creepy FPS with great shooting. That
and it’s inclusion on PC Game Pass at
launch is reason enough to give it a
shot with some friends.
But I can’t shake the thought of
what Extraction would be like with a
L4D-inspired campaign structure.
There’s so much to enjoy in its slow,
deliberate co-op combat, but its
disjointed missions cause the whole
game to feel aimless. By trying to add
replayability through randomisation,
Ubi has made a less replayable game.
Rainbow Six Extraction is not at all
the spiritual Left 4 Dead 3 I was
hoping for back then, which is fine,
because that game, Back 4 Blood,
came out just a few months ago. But
unlike in 2019, Extraction is not alone.
The last few years have seen an
explosion of cool co-op games vying
to be the star of my Discord server- Back 4 Blood is fantastic, The
Anacrusis is intriguing, Ready Or Not
is pretty cool, GTFO is fun, Deep Rock
Galactic and World War Z are still
getting updates, and Warhammer
40K: Darktide is on the horizon.
There are a lot of fun ways to
shoot AI baddies with buds in 2022,
so it’s impressive that Extraction is
distinct from every game I just listed.
It’s trying to be something slower and
tactical, and it even succeeds most of
the time. But punishing is not usually
what my friends and I are looking for
in a co-op shooter (we get enough of
that from competitive games), so I
doubt Extraction will ever be the
game we fire up on a Friday night.
73
Rainbow Six Extraction is
a fun but unremarkable
co-op shooter with some
very good ooze. It’s a
good distraction.VERDICTUbisoft has
plucked 18
operators from
its existing
rosterGROSS PRODUCT
How to read the room3
THE SPRAWL
Black goo that slows players
down, you can shoot or melee
attack it to get rid of it.4
HEALTH BAR
69 HP left – nice. You’ll need
to keep an eye on this, as healing
isn’t plentiful.1
SPIKER
Most Archaens can be very
quickly stealth killed if you don’t
make a peep.2
NESTS
Gross pus sacs that should
be shot on sight before they birth
more aliens.1234Rainbow Six Extraction
REVIEW