Review: TOM CLANCY'S RAINBOW SIX: EXTRACTION Shoots Accurately at Nothing
Game franchises like Warcraft, Final Fantasy, and Pokémon along with many others have branched out to different genres. These ventures into other game genres come with varying levels of success. The Rainbow Six franchise has gone from stealth led stories to near perfect tactical PvP. Now, Rainbow Six: Extraction goes into the world of fighting randomly generated missions filled with aliens, PvE objectives, and rewards. While a lot of the concepts work well and seem good on paper, the motivation to play more than a few hours can die as quickly as your match-made teammates and dreams of success.
Extraction is fairly simple, you and a group of up to three players are sent to a variety of locations that are split into three segments. Each segment has a main objective, a fair amount of scary aliens, and a chance for lots of EX for your general level and specific operative you’re using. Your job is to locate the objective and either move an object from point A to point B, kill a specific thing, or defend an area. If you survive, your team can decide to keep going to the next segment or extract early and keep the experience they’ve already earned.
The concepts here are nice and their simplicity makes gameplay the focus. Another major concept is that when you fail, you are actually penalized in a number of ways which give a real sense of risk and reward. However, the rewards are mildly underwhelming especially for how many hours of playing (at peak efficiency) it would take to earn them, making the risk seem a bit like overkill. Don’t get me wrong, new weapons, gear and cosmetics are fun, but in a game that is PvE oriented and filled with wild aliens, I would have wanted a lot more over-the-top and wild content weapons, items and skins to unlock. But it isn’t like there aren't crazy looking cosmetics in the game, they are just locked behind the store and more money instead of end game progressions and accomplishments.
If the long road of unlockables isn’t your thing, maybe the moment to moment gameplay will suck you in? To be frank, I doubt it would. The gunplay and strategies can be quite exciting because it is a carbon copy of Rainbow Six Siege. But all that precise and high level gunplay is wasted on mediocre A.I. and hordes of bland enemies. Yes, they may look good and they will kill you quickly, but after seeing the same 11 enemies acting the same way for countless hours gets very monautness. Yes, the objectives can be difficult to complete, but that difficulty comes more from bullet sponge enemies and lots of them running around instead of smarter enemies or more complex objectives that require better team communication/cooperation.
As mentioned, if you fail an objective or all party members die, there are real consequences. You might lose an operative (until they can be rescued), you will gain less XP, or worse, get negative XP. That’s right, you will actually lose overall progression if you fail a mission entirely. I can understand some punishment for being overly zealous or careless in your matches. But let’s put it in perspective, for example, if you are at level 3 by gaining something like 30,000 XP, you will literally go down to 28,000 or 25,000 XP for failing a mission. That means you have to gain that XP AGAIN to get to level 3/30,000 XP and then play more times to move ahead. I understand this puts a certain weight and seriousness to playing, even losing some XP, but if you match make with bad players, then there is virtually nothing you can do if they refuse to extract early. I find it far too punishing and literally two steps forward and one step back (sometimes two steps back).
Overall, Extraction is a lot of fun at its core, but the lack of meaningful (or logical) progression or interesting PvE objectives keeps the experience less engaging as time goes on. I love grinding games for unlocks, cosmetics and more, but the gameplay got stale after a relatively short period of time and none of the rewards felt like they were worth the grind. If you love Rainbow Six Siege, have some friends to play with all the time and want a grindy PvE experience, I’m sure you’ll like Extraction, otherwise, there are plenty of other free-to-play and paid PvE games to enjoy.
