SHOUT OUT - An ode to Rainbow Six: Extraction

Easy purchase.

By Jonathan Garrett
03/04/23

NOTE: thatHITBOX Shout Out’s are not sponsored content. They’re games, developers, individuals, or issues that we want to highlight and share purely out of interest.

Rainbow Six: Extraction is a fantastic co-op shooter that more people should play. As a budget price release, and built on the foundations of Siege, it certainly had a template for success. But whether it was poor release timing, fatigue over the “zombie / alien / mutant” genre, or perhaps suffering from a middling PR push, it never seemed to capture the wider conversation. Of course, it dropped into Game Pass on Day 1, which meant it certainly found a core audience willing to give it a burn.

I can say with confidence that it delivered. Dozens of hours later, I was still being surprised. New twists on familiar objectives, a fresh configuration of enemy spawns, or simply one Tormentor too many (if you know, you know); there is so much built in to the core mechanics to keep you guessing, and keep you playing, that quite frankly it was impossible to put down.

I still feel like there’s elements I’ve missed, and that’s a credit to the designers who crafted an experience defined by randomly generated chaos. It’s not perfect by any means; the timed events forcing you into public matchmaking is a shame, as the option to play with friends only would have been appreciated in a game that essentially lives and dies by effective co-ordination. Some class abilities (largely copied from Siege) become redundant in the tougher stages, and the penalties for death and losing characters are unceremoniously dropped when you really screw things up, which lower the stakes a bit in the late game.

What I will say: download this game. Pick it up in a sale. Try it before it drops out of Game Pass. We even nominated it for Game of the Year in 2022, because it is, surprisingly, really that good.