It’s easy to see why Rainbow Six: Siege hasn’t been greeted with open arms. The once tactical game that required careful pre-game planning has gone in a slightly different direction. Don’t get me wrong, I think there has been some decent changes, but to the hardcore fans of the series, I think keeping the play-style the same would have been better.
Rainbow Six: Siege is a beautiful, police simulator concentrated around multiplayer gaming. There are two different types of mode to really choose from. There is a single player campaign but it’s very weak, so it’s not worth mentioning too much about that. The game modes are Terrorist Hunt which puts a team of five players against AI opponents, and a standard team based game pitting two teams of five against eachother.Within these game modes lies objectives. Things like hostage rescue and disarm the bomb. Pretty standard stuff.
At those rare times when teams are actually working together to secure an objective work wonderfully, although this doesn’t seem to happen 90% of the time. It almost feels as if the game is taking huge influences from a Counter-Strike public match, where players sprawl off in completely different directions and run solo towards an objective. This game has definitely been designed with clan play in mind, everyone wearing headsets and in direct communication with each other kind of thing.
Rainbow Six: Siege works as a kind of RPG framework. You earn renown points to unlock certain guns from the armoury or even new operatives. Each operative has a different skill which works for either attacking or defensive actions. This works well, however, some of the operatives are extremely unbalanced, something that Ubisoft need to work on quickly in my opinion. One of them being a bullet-proof shield. Carry one of them and you’re pretty much invincible. Stand there with your shield raised and as soon as an opponent runs out of bullets, lower it and fire. Works every time which is a tad annoying.
Graphically the game looks pretty good, but I couldn’t help feel that it’s a little bit dated now that we’re in an era of Star Wars: Battlefront and Far Cry: Primal. The set pieces all look and feel a little bit square to me, and things like walls bursting apart when you use breach charges don’t look as good as I think they should for a 2015 game.
The game feels solid despite my minor complaints. It’s very fun to play, and can have some tense moments, especially when you’re down to a 1 vs 3 situation. If you’re that one alive of course. I would say it’s still worth checking out, even if it’s a game you’d buy once it’s come down in price. For those of you who are interested, it’s available in the Steam store for £49.99.
