Zombie shooters has made a resurgence for the past couple of years and just like your stereotypical zombies, they really just keep coming back no matter how much you beat its ugly head. Now before anyone grabs a bat and bash my brains out, I will say that while I’m not exactly the biggest fan of the genre, I do appreciate the kind of cooperative experience it brings especially with friends at your back just waiting to shoot you right in the head when the crazy Archaeans come running. It’s a kind of game that is both fun when you’re laughing around at your mistakes but also a kind that mellows down the fun and the laughter until it becomes something else entirely after a dozen or so retries.
However unlike the more gun blazing and adrenaline-inducing zombie shooters we know and love, Rainbow Six Extraction borrows the tactical and stealthy approach to encounters from its older brother Siege without it being “competitive” to say the least. So you’re never gonna run into a fight (although you can) hoping to kill anything while spraying bullets at every possible direction. This is true most of the time but only until someone brings a shotgun and isn’t afraid to use it.
Although let’s take a few steps back for a bit and ask what exactly is Rainbow Six Extraction. In its simplest form, Extraction is basically a cooperative mode of up to three players that introduces operatives from Rainbow Six Siege which puts you into three sets of missions that you can hope to achieve but at any point in time, players can extract and save what little life they had left. However there’s no real campaign connecting each of the three objectives you’re tasked with, which is a huge bummer when most if not all games of the genre gives you an end goal to work with as you progress. You basically go in, do your job and then get out which is not exactly motivating to say the least. But if you’re hoping for a game that you can just play in quick short bursts without having to worry about the nitty-gritty details of the campaign, Extraction plays out perfectly for that situation. Its randomly pulled objectives that ranges from capturing specific Archaeans to rescuing your MIA operators also adds to the unpredictability of what you can expect for each session. This adds even more replayability when you consider which three operators to use or what loadout and gear they should be having to match the current objectives.
On paper, the idea is solid and makes for a fun and exhilarating game that is never exactly the same at each intrusion to the infested fields. In practice, it’s a bit more complicated though no thanks to its weird design choice. Before going into a mission, you can freely choose which of the dozens of operators you can bring to the fight. They also have their own default loadout that gets improved as you reach higher individual levels for each one of them. It’s a good thing because it rewards players with progression towards certain operators but what’s weird with the idea is that operators can’t restore their permanent health bars even after they finish a mission. This in turn forces the player to learn new operators pretty early on until their health regenerates after a few missions but what’s worse here is when a squad fails to extract, operators in that particular mission goes MIA which can only be retrieved by going into another mission as a different operator and successfully extracting them. This becomes a never ending cycle of changing operators for each mission which at times might not exactly be the best choice when it comes to what the current objectives are at the time.
The sadistic gameplay loop is as sadistic as it sounds. You are punished for going loud and proud but rewarded for being a steady hunter in the night. Thankfully, Siege has really nurtured the basic gameplay needed for Extraction’s coop experience because the random people I get teamed up with are often crouched and picking their targets carefully which makes the experience bearable until someone gets the itchy finger to go trigger happy. There’s definitely a lot of Siege’s influence that makes Extraction fun, be it the many unique operator gadgets that literally decides how your team approach objectives to the signature style of Siege with its breakable walls and what not which isn’t exactly something you’d expect a zombie shooter would allow you to do. It’s that kind of mixture which separates Extraction to other zombie shooters out there.
Visually, it’s a pretty stellar looking game with fluid controls given that it did stem from a cooperative shooter. There’s really nothing I can find fault with how it plays although if I’m being a bit nitpicky, is that it could’ve gone better if there were a bit more choices with its map selection per milestone tier which could’ve atleast gave it a bit more oomph with its complete package before the more casual of gamers find it repetitive before advancing into a new tier of maps to play around with. There’s also quite a good selection of enemy types and environmental traps that really test one’s mettle in dealing with the Archaean menace be it the simple grunts that could either be dormant or roaming around to enemies that run at you and explode dealing damage over time in its effective radius. There’s really never a dull moment as soon as you start a mission but that’s considering if that mission actually starts… since quite a few number of times, matchmaking does fail and you’d have to spend the next minute or two queuing up for another one. Nothing really game breaking but it does add fuel to the fire of things that could’ve been made better.
So in a nutshell, Rainbow Six Extraction is something that executes well with its addictive gameplay loop despite not having a real story to follow through and if you can look past its shortcomings and weird design choices. It definitely gives an arcade-y feel where you can either spend hours in matchmaking or with a bunch of other friends or be played in quick short bursts every now and then. But it’s also a game that takes time to be good at it and mastering it’s in and outs is easier said than done.
Enjoy the review? want to read more of our reviews? then click right here to be whisked away to the realm of our opinions.
You must be logged in to post a comment.