The anatomy of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege consists of equal parts predictability and disorder. Predictable are the initial forays of both teams – the drones of the attackers slithering throughout the building and infecting its many darkened corners, the defending team affixing traps and barricades in the hope of tempering the ensuing enemy assault. Even beyond the first ninety seconds of live action can things still remain relatively easy to anticipate. On the ground floor, your fingers dig harder into the grip of your rifle as feint rumbles begin to emanate from the upper reaches of your holdout. Whilst above, window fortifications fracture as glassy-eyed assailants submerge beneath the powdered haze and begin their pursuit. Harder to control though is everything else beyond the initial overture, for its only after the game clock starts ticking that the mundanity of fortifying and foraging becomes more important, and the intricacies of Siege begin to blossom exponentially.
Rainbow Six Siege exists as a testament to the ideal marriage of erraticism and precision. Like Clancy games of old, gunfighting is approached with the sense that wastefulness is akin to carelessness, and thus ammunition spent aiming anywhere other than the cranium of your opponent is ammunition not fulfilling its purpose. It takes a certain level of lethal precision to flawlessly cut down an opponent before they even have a chance to raise their weapon, but it takes a great degree more to have manoeuvred into a position to do so without ever being detected. The deft touch espoused by the more agile and tactile player is one befitting many of Clancy’s revered protagonists, not least a callback to several Rainbow Six games of old that revelled in such a nuanced approach to combat. With Siege though, the emphasis seems less on coating the canvas with delicate flecks of red, and more with puncturing it entirely. There’s room for the measured approach of older Clancy games, but there’s success to be found outside of conservative combat too. Rather than reducing the labyrinthian hallways of every map to little more than deathly chokepoints, you’re instead encouraged to forge a path all your own, with wafer-thin walls and breakable flooring helping to eradicate any sense of personal safety. And it’s the prospect of a lone bullet piercing the stucco and changing the balance of play that keeps any match from being a foregone conclusion.
Every unique environment in Siege is built with a few different objective modes in mind – capture, extract and defuse. The three aren’t particularly distinctive, and are almost interchangeable when successive matches in a single play session begin to blur into one another. At times anyway it feels as though, instead of a live hostage, you may as well be throwing the glowing box used for the ‘capture’ objective out of the second story window instead. Every match can always be decided by the elimination of all five enemy players however, with their position in relation to the objective largely helping the attacking team decide their course of action. Attacking two different emission devices at the tail end of a presidential plane means that the defending team are likely to be split between the two locations, and thus eliminating one of the groups may force the other into action and free up the site for an active defusal. Inversely, defending a hostage whilst burrowed deep into the nose of the plane means that the enemy team may only approach from a forwardly direction, allowing the defenders to focus on fortifying just one general area. Different objectives mean that the same map can be played in many contrasting ways, with the verticality of every area also playing a large part in the direction of both teams.
As varied as every map is though, they all tend to lack an atmosphere befitting the gravity of the situation. Police cordons and the flashing lights of empty squad cars say little of the initial fight before the arrival of your team, whilst the silence beyond the rummaging of the defenders inside the building hardly sets the heart racing. Occasionally, you may even see a news chopper hovering above, but to look at it though a magnified lens is to see it hang there without a presence, a poorly rendered smudge in the background that struggles to convey the level of urgency affirmed by the games initial cutscene.
One of Siege’s clearest successes though is in the usefulness of every one of the twenty operators available. There is no operator in the game devoid of purpose, with even some of the more less appealing choices being entirely capable of shaping and reshaping the climate of any given match. Divided into ‘attackers’ and ‘defenders’, your operator choice is, again, likely going to be determined by the map and objective at hand. If you team finds itself sequestered in a small area, then the double-strength barriers that the defender ‘Castle’ comes equipped with can help turn a simple conference room into a heavily-guarded rampart. If you’re instead intent on crippling all defender electronics, then the attacker ‘Thatcher’ and his clutch of EMP grenades can cause catastrophic damage that frees up the rest of your team for a uninterrupted breach. And as far as the more bold approach goes, there isn’t a defender who packs a stronger punch than ‘Tachanka’, a heavy-set Russian fellow with a portable 50 calibre turret and a lust for wanton destruction.
In being a game that doesn’t shy way from the lauding of player communication above all else, there’s also something to be said for the combination of operators and their abilities. For the attacking team, operator ‘Ash’ can create new lines of sight for the methodical marksman ‘Glaz’. For the defenders, a synergy between the electrified barbed wire of ‘Bandit’, mixed with the disruptor charges of ‘Mute’ can negate the enemy teams visual advantages entirely. Every operator has a talent and a crutch, and it’s the goal of the opposition to identify key strengths and exploit weaknesses. It’s a cyclical endeavour in the best possible way, and an interchanging meta that keeps the experience of Siege fresh and self-replenishing.
Operators in the game are each inherently diverse, but they are not particularly permeable. Outside of a meagre offering of weapons, the only avenue of personalisation is in tacking on a barrel attachment or wrapping the body of your chosen armament in one of many garishly designed skins. Like skins, attachments are also generally only for an aesthetic benefit. None of the few choices you have available to you drastically alter the performance of your weapon, but personal preference may dictate the use of a flash hider for a little bit more concealment when engaging from afar.
Although many of the weapon skins available can be purchased using the in-game currency of ‘Renown’, the few that don’t tend to induce a vomitous reaction are all barred behind an oddly structured premium equivalent. ‘R6 credits’ thus offer the chance to stand out in replays and on camera feeds, but their ridiculous utilisation leaves a lot to be desired. A £30 lump sum for a pack of nonessential currency is completely unbecoming of the games reach, even if the overlying intention is in using R6 Credits to subsidise future free content.
Outside of its flag bearing player-versus-player mode, Siege also offers two other ways of familiarising yourself with each of its maps and operators. ‘Situations’ shows what might’ve been had developers Ubisoft included a story-driven aspect to the game, with a handful of animated cutscenes giving some clarity to what little plot propels Siege’s general context. It’s more of a tutorial than anything, with the completion of each mission giving a much needed Renown boost in the early stages of your Siege career. ’Terrorist Hunt’ meanwhile replaces opposition players with enemy AI, and encourages teams to hone their communicative abilities and strategies prior to taking on the world.
Rainbow Six Siege may be evidently light on content, yet more than any other game in its position, it makes the most of what it has to work with. The calculated design that has gone into the core game ensures that every match is different from the last, with adrenaline-fuelled gunfighting propping up the almost insurmountable challenge of mastering every given situation. You won’t, of course. Siege is more about near-mastery than complete ownership over every floor tile and sightline. And there’ll always be an operator that you hadn’t foreseen, always be a problem to arise at an inopportune moment or mistake on your part when it comes to putting down the mobile drone and picking up the rifle. And when it does come time for the swift injection of smoke and fire and shell casings that shape the outcome of every round, there’s still no guarantee that your careful planning won’t amount to nought.
As shots reverberate off the basement brickwork and kick up chalk into the air, you’ll have little time to wait and ponder. To fire at the demolition expert coating the room with fragmentation grenades is to leave yourself open to the electronics seeker. To prioritise her is to give the explosives technician enough time to lay waste to your most important fortification. And to rush him is to open yourself up to fire from the sniper perched on the window pane atop the stairs. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege rewards ingenuity and punishes thoughtlessness just as much as it contradictorily emphasises snap judgements and heat of the moment heroism. But to condense the games many elements is to arrive at its pursuit of balance. Balance of class choice, of methods and of actions. Siege may be a game of duality, but it’s a duality that Ubisoft clearly understand, providing as they have a shooter that succeeds and flourishes on its base principles alone. But walls were made to be broken, and so they shall be. And in Siege, there is no chaos but the chaos necessary for deliverance.
Rainbow Six Siege Year 9 Season 2 Operation New Blood sees the Recruit rework, the introduction of R6 Membership and more.
Rainbow Six Siege with night maps, ranked mode shakeup, and a return to pure fun would be exactly what Ubisoft needs to return to this game.
Traditional sequels are a thing of the past, much like Bad Company 3 and another very famous and undelivered third entry that goes without saying
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It's an online only, average, objective based tactical shooter.
I haven't gotten that far into it yet, but I absolutely love this change in direction for the series. I can see where you're coming from with the atmosphere complaint but in reality I wouldn't expect much activity directly surrounding the immediate vicinity of some hazardous material or whatnot. Hostage situation? I suppose. But with that considered, the simple act of breaching some barricaded area more than made up for that tense atmosphere imo.
Such a surprise hit for me.