In one recurring mission in Rainbow Six Extraction, your Special Ops veteran is transported into a hellish parallel dimension where they face off against a malignant, mutated facsimile of one of your fellow Operators from the Rainbow Six Siege cast. An armored, multi-tiered health bar appears across the top of the screen, and it depletes as you dump clip after clip of ammunition into their scaly carapace. It is a cosmic, apocalyptic boss fight, and it’s hard not to think about just how far this series has strayed from its once-dogmatic faithfulness to gritty Navy SEAL realism. In Extraction, Ubisoft successfully brings the series to its wildest frontiers yet, but while this high-stakes co-op creates thrills out of the gate, it doesn’t seem to have the same staying power as its competitive cousin.
Extraction does make a meek attempt to justify its science fiction: There are some short cutscenes hovering around the margins and an unwieldy codex overflowing with flavor text that explain the massive onyx obelisks that protrude from the ground all over the globe. Some are the size of skyscrapers — one impaling the Statue of Liberty — and they've unleashed a band of zombified parasitic aberrations annoyingly dubbed the "Archæans," which were first introduced in the 2018 Outbreak limited-time event in Siege. Those same heroes have been deployed to hold the line, and as a party of three, a party of two, or by yourself, you delve deep into the fetid underbelly of this grotesque insurgency. It is pure pulp – body horror blended with steely tactics – and as someone with an appreciation for Rainbow Six's sillier side (like its two trips to Las Vegas) I relished the chance to steep into this bizarre new world without asking too many questions.
So yes, Extraction is very much a traditional co-op shooter augmented by the sublime mechanics Ubisoft mastered in the ever-popular Siege. Stealth is key; you slither through the muck with your two friends, hoping to take down the demons in silence in order to avoid unleashing the latent mob lingering behind every corner. From a game design perspective, this is a no-brainer: Extraction is a chance to enjoy Siege's one-of-a-kind gunplay in a slower-paced environment than the mother game's madcap competitive matches. Siege lets you annihilate targets with surgical precision: you can score headshots from across the map through plaster walls, or locate a target by the mere sound of their footsteps. But Siege has also cultivated a fully calcified playerbase who've obsessed over it for seven years, and jumping into matchmaking as a less-experienced player often feels like walking into a buzzsaw. Extraction, on the other hand, lets us play with those shooting mechanics while aiming at dumber, slower NPCs. We can indulge in the euphoria more than ever.
In fact, Extraction often resembles an elaborate expansion to Siege – in another world, this could have easily been presented as a generous DLC pack. All of the Operators you and your friends can choose from are directly imported from Siege, right down to their special abilities and character models. The in-game geometry is tight and compact like a 5v5 map, which is a departure from the elaborate, cross-country treks demanded by games like Back 4 Blood and Left 4 Dead. In fact, everything from the art design to the gun models bear an uncanny kinship to the formula Ubisoft laid out in 2015.
The only incongruity is the thick layer of gristly, galactic muck splayed across every surface. I mean this in the best way possible: Rainbow Six Extraction is gross. Walls and floors bubble with black, speed-dampening ooze, and bulbous pustules glow in the dark and can be popped like water balloons. The enemies range from terrifying, minotaur-like beasts stalking the corridors to bloated quadrupeds that detonate with noxious gas when struck with a bullet. Hell, when an operator is KO'd they're smothered in a crusty yellow coat of foam that, apparently, preserves them – it's one of the most viscerally unpleasant things I've ever witnessed in a video game. Extraction is like a bizarre alternate reality where David Cronenberg directed Rainbow Six Siege, awakening a virulent nightmare that had been lying dormant.
I don't mean any of that as a criticism. After all, Extraction has been advertised as a loud, proud spinoff of Siege, and as a casual player of the mainline series it was nice to pick up a beloved operator like Tachanka and know innately what role he fills on a team. But anyone expecting Extraction to serve as a bold new chapter for the Rainbow Six canon will be sorely disappointed. This is a wild experiment that brings to mind Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon or Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare. Both were bold endeavors that offered a radical new interpretation on established gameplay systems, but didn't muster much staying power or advance the actual story.
Case in point: Extraction has four different zones, divided into 12 primary levels, and all of them play out the exact same way. You and your friends will select your Operators and airdrop into a battlefront where you'll complete a random selection of three objectives. Maybe you need to lure a particularly beefy Archæan into a trap, maybe you're instructed to clear out a cell of hives, or maybe you need to rescue a terrified civilian, among others. To its credit, there are a good variety of these assignments, and while they'll certainly recur between runs, I never felt like I was stuck in the same loop.
Once those three tasks are complete, the team can decide to pass through an airlock and attempt another mission or extract back to base with all of the experience points they've banked. It's a fun push-and-pull which will undoubtedly reveal the conservative and aggressive tendencies among your party. I tended to err on the cautious side, while a friend was more than happy to push into the next bloc despite our dwindling health supplies. I like how Extraction engaged my more emotional sensibilities, beyond whatever group of enemies were in front of us. Sometimes, all I needed was a good pep talk to believe that my party was capable of surviving the next trial. Sometimes we were even right.
The most fun I had with Extraction, by far, is when someone in my group succumbed to the horde. In that scenario, their body must be escorted back to the extraction point – because if you don't, the operator that person was playing as will be removed from their roster. Yes, if you go down for the count as Hibana, a red X will appear across her face in your next character select screen. If the whole party wipes, the only way to reclaim an MIA operator is to re-enter the level on a future run (with a different character) and attempt to pry them loose from the clutches of the parasite. Only then can they return to battle in a future run.
I love this mechanic. It reminded me of my most anxious XCOM 2 runs in which I tried to escort my trusty band of alien-killing agitators out of a fight gone bad. As a whole, Ubisoft has often opted for a light touch with its punishments – I mean, Assassin's Creed autosaves roughly every 30 seconds – but in Extraction, every engagement is life or death. Even health points carry over between deployments, which means if Smoke is whittled down to within an inch of his life, he'll need to spend a few sessions on the shelf to reconstitute. Better yet, if an operator is lost to the churn, you'll suffer a sizable debuff to your prestige-style progression threshold until they're rescued. I once lost a level after botching an assignment, which, while brutal, added a palpable sense of drama to every firefight thereafter.