Rainbow Six Extraction is a major departure for the series. Rather than giving players a tense linear campaign or tactical multiplayer, it offers a co-op experience about an alien invasion. Rather than infiltrating houses or public areas, players team up to plant trackers in alien nests, hunt high-value targets, and destroy green nests that spread their webby influence. Other than featuring the same operators as Rainbow Six Siege, the only similarity shared by the two titles is Ubisoft’s dedication to future support through free updates and limited-time events. In this vein, I was given a chance to check out the first limited-time event for Rainbow Six Extraction: Spillover. The event brings limited-time unlocks, a new game mode, operator, and piece of equipment that is arguably the best in the game.
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The mode mixes things up by placing a team of three players in one large map that they will have to navigate and stay in throughout the entire match. They’ll have access to a limited amount of health, ammo, and equipment refills as well as a place to grab canisters of Dissolution Agent. Those canisters have to be taken to different objectives that players have to defend for a set time while waves of enemies attack them.
Exactly how difficult those waves are depends on two factors. The first is what kind of objective it is. There are three in total, one that spawns elite enemies, one that spawns invisible enemies, and one that spawns enemies with spores to get in the way. Every match has three of each objective type for players to clear. The waves are also determined by the tier of difficulty active at the time. As objectives are cleared, the difficulty climbs from the first tier to the third, with the last being brutally difficult. When I played my matches with Ubisoft employees, we got close to a successful run but lost on the final objective, and even that was a struggle.
The difficulty is really great, as it pushes players to strategize on multiple levels. Firstly, team composition is everything here. You need to cover various angles on every objective and need the flexibility to deal with multiple threats coming your way. Secondly, your team has to decide which order to tackle objectives. With how punishing the final objectives are, you have to ensure that you’re doing the easiest ones for your team if you want any hope of surviving. Last is the delicate resource management. With only so much equipment and health refills, it has to be well thought out every time you use one.
Playing the limited time mode also allows you to progress through equipment unlocks, with the big star of the list being the new automated turret. The turret can only be unlocked during the event but can still be used afterward, and boy, are you going to want to make sure you get your hands on it. The turret is one of the most useful and fun pieces of gear in the entire game and feels straight out of Aliens while also being particularly useful in the defense-focused mode of Spillover. Putting it down to cover a direction and watching it rapidly snap to enemies and kill them with a burst of rounds never got old, and I doubt it ever will.
The Rainbow Six Extraction Spillover update will also introduce Zofia to its roster of operators. Zofia has been a big part of Siege’s meta for some time now, so it’s great to see her make an appearance in Extraction as well. She brings her signature grenade launcher to the game. It’s handy for shooting stun grenades to deal with bigger enemies and impact grenades to take down groups of smaller ones.
My only worry about the event is with just how long it will be able to keep players’ attention. I saw a few different maps during my time with it, and the objectives were randomly placed much like the core game, but constantly encountering the same number of the same objectives every game does seem like it will get repetitive. It would have been really great if there was even just a fourth or fifth objective type so that they could rotate them out to bring some more variety.
Regardless of possible repetition, the Rainbow Six Extraction Spillover event seems like a solid start for the title’s post-launch support. The new automated turret is a lot of fun while also being extremely useful, and Zofia fans should be very happy with how the operator is handled here.
Rainbow Six Extraction is available now on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
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