After spending a solid 25 hours with the beta of one of my most anticipated games from E32014, I have a lot of thoughts on Ubisoft’s next release for the Rainbow Six franchise. Rainbow Six Siege is a tactical first person shooter that takes a slower more methodical/realistic approach to the first person genre. By no means does the game play like a simulation such as a game from the ARMA franchise, but rather, Siege strikes a balance between arcady close-quarter action and slower tactical play that both fans of the older Rainbow Six games and FPS fans in general can enjoy. But the real draw for Siege is the almost fully destructible environments through weapons and equipment that completely shakes up the FPS genre in a fresh new innovative way.
Siege manages to deliver on destructible cover in way that makes Battlefield’s “levolution” mechanic seem like a complete gimmick. Bullets penetrate walls, shotguns blast holes through walls, and explosives such as grenades and breaching charges are able to fully destroy walls. Each destructible option offers new and emergent ways for players to gain the upper hand of a battle on the fly. The destructible environments multiply the variety of approaches a player can use in any given encounter. This variety is multiplied again exponentially with the addition of unique class ability items such as heartbeat sensors that detect enemies through walls, and sledge hammers that can level a wall quickly without and explosives. On top of that, the game adds verticality to the mix through repelling ropes, breachable floors, and breachable ceilings. The sheer amount of player choice in any specific encounter offers an uncannily amount of variability and excitement in a close quarter maps that without the destructibility would seems mundane.
Siege presents itself in a classic Counter Strike fashions where one team is defending either a bomb or an area of the map, and the other team has to defuse or attack. What Siege adds to the formula is a brief thirty second planning period for defenders to set traps and reinforce walls, and allows the attackers to scout the area through the use of controllable drones that navigate the map on the ground. The planning period is a clever way to help both defenders and attackers adjust themselves to a map and gives them a little bit of time to plan before the action starts. This period of time at thirty seconds feels neither too long or too short and acts as an innovative addition to matches.
Unlike some modern day competitive shooters, Siege ditches the idea of classes and instead has players pick from one of eight unlockable operators for both the attackers and defenders. Each operator has their own personal abilities and only one of each type of operator can exists on a team at any given time. Allowing only one of each operator on a team works as a double edged sword. On one hand having a variety of operators promotes teamwork, on the other hand, if a player doesn’t pick the operator he wants fast enough, another teammate will likely choose that operator leaving the original player to choose from a smaller selection of operators. Each operator has one unique piece of equipment and each operator varies in speed vs. armor. The equipment offers satisfying depth to the game and allows players to participate in different roles. As far as balance goes, there always seems to be equipment to counterbalance the other team's equipment on both the attacking and defending side. Shields seem to be overpowered at the moment but grenades and a well placed C4 can even out the situation. The shooting in Siege has a certain weight to it that feels satisfying and welcomed and only three maps are present in the beta, but each feel different enough from each other to keep locations feeling fresh.
Now to address the issues..
Although this is a beta, Siege has suffers from networking and matchmaking issues that have occurred throughout the entirety of the beta. For the first few days of the closed beta I only managed to get into three games in a four hour period. Since than, the servers have improved quite a bit but the networking is still inconsistent, taking anywhere from one to fifteen minutes to join a match. People joining mid match also tend to lock up the game completely, but like the networking issues, this problem seems to be less prevalent as the beta goes on. But again, this is still a beta and networking issues have continued to improve over time.
The beta also seems to suffer from a fair amount of what I like to call, Ubisoft jank. Ubisoft is no stranger to releasing broken games that suffer from small glitches to game breaking bugs and Siege seems to be no exception. Drones occasionally fall out of the world, end game kill-cams are completely broken, character ragdoll does this weird slow-mo glitch after death, and getting stuck in map geometry has happened a few times. Although these bugs are prevalent, they don’t drastically hinder the gameplay experience, and I was glad to hear Ubisoft is taking another month to hopefully polish the jank before release in December.
Now to address the elephant in the room, the games price. Siege will NOT offer a single player component upon release and is shipping as a full priced 60$ competitive shooter. Yes there is a terrorist hunt, but honestly it’s nothing special and is basically just the existing competitive maps with a set number of AI running amuck. Unfortunately some people are going to outright dismiss the game entirely because of the lack of campaign. But if Siege delivers on all the maps and game modes it promises, im here to say, if you’re an online competitive shooting fan, there is more than enough depth here to satisfy hundreds of hours of enjoyable gameplay.
Still there is one large caveat I have to mention.
To fully enjoy this game you need to be able to communicate with people. Playing without a mic against a team with mics will more than likely lead to you getting your ass handed to you. The game basically requires a mic and I highly recommend going into this game with a few friends in mind. I would NOT recommend this game to anyone who has no intention in communicating.
With that in mind, this leads to my ultimate fear for this game. Because Siege is coming out late in the holiday cycle, after the likes of COD, Halo, and even Fallout, I’m afraid people are going to already be feeling fatigue in the FPS genre before Siege releases. If you combine the release factor with the pricing problem, and demanding communication requirements, I’m worried that Siege is going fail to capture a dedicated player base thus ultimately hurting the games sales. If this were to be the case, it would be a damn shame because Rainbow Six Siege is by far one of the most innovative FPS's I’ve played in the past decade and the destructible cover offers a completely unique and exhilarating experience that should not be missed by any competitive shooter fans.
Here are three extra beta codes for the PS4 and some raw gameplay footage for people who are curious
LFCC-GBN4-J9QG
E3TK-52NJ-G24A
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