Rainbow Six Extraction is a little like going to your parents home and finding an entirely different family living there amongst your parents’ floral furnishings. Here is a game where things pretty much look to be the same – hey, there’s the destructible environments we know so well, and over there you can see the usual smorgasbord of tech-savvy operators – and yes, there are similarities between Extraction and the R6 games that have come before it… but, well, you can’t help but notice the differences more than the parallels. It’s almost as if those differences stand out a touch sharper – a little starker – when you’re thigh-deep in the warm waters of familiarity.
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction review
- Publisher: Ubisoft
- Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
- Platform: Played on PS5
- Availability: Out now on PS4, PS5, PC, Xbox (Game Pass), Stadia, and Luna
Not that being different is wrong, of course. Sometimes taking an alternate road or looking at something through a new lens helps, of course; particularly when it comes to a twenty-something-year-old franchise in one of the most oversaturated genres in gaming. And that’s what makes Rainbow Six Extraction so thrilling, I guess. Though the gunplay and stealthy tactics will feel wonderfully familiar to those who’ve spent time in Rainbow Six’s annals – as will its roster of series stalwarts – Extraction is just different enough to stand out not only from its predecessors, but from the FPS genre more generally, too.
Once called Rainbow Six Quarantine – you know, back in those halcyon days before any of us had ever really thought about what being in quarantine might feel like, let alone experienced one firsthand – Extraction’s story is light-touch but perfectly satisfactory, delivered without a singleplayer or “main” campaign. Picking up where Outbreak (a limited-time event in Rainbow Six Siege) dropped off, the story tracks the eruption of the Chimera parasite, which has broken out all over the US – yikes, that sounds depressingly familiar – and yes, it’s spreading. Fast. Our job, as no-nonsense REACT (Rainbow Exogenous Analysis and Containment Team) agents, is to destroy enemies, capture samples, and collect the data society needs to contain, and eradicate, this deadly threat.