Preview: Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege

Rainbow Six: Siege is about three things: defending a position, breaching that position and strategising how to best do either one or the other. This is team bases tactics at its finest and its still very early days for Siege.

It’s five on five and it’s quick. Playing in such confined spaces make it incredibly fast paced, turn the wrong corner and the match can change dramatically in seconds.

In my first round in the hands on I was defending. While setting up the house, my immediate thoughts turned to preparing for the final rescue call in Left 4 Dead; strange when you consider the two games are nothing alike, other than the perspective. I ran around, fortifying walls, boarding up windows and erecting shields. When the set up time concluded and the team set to breach was on their way I realized the common factor was simply the feeling of an imminent, unknown threat. Add some decent tactics, a little skill and teamwork to the thrill of protecting something with your life and you gave yourself a game that doesn’t take long to hook you.

Rainbow Six has always been quite tactical but Siege takes it one step further, almost like a tower defense game. When you’re setting up barricades you have to mindful you’re not cutting off your line of sight. You can still block off a doorway or window allowing for better defense and blast a hole through it so you can peak through. In fact most of the environment is destructible so you never know when someone will blow through a wall and pounce on you.

There are a few differences when you’re playing as the “good” guys trying to infiltrate and take out the other team. Obviously the goal is different and your first move should be to find the hostage and protect them. While the defensive team is setting up barricades and fortifying the area you can send in a drone to get a layout of the house and get and try and find the hostage’s location. The best part about playing an infiltrator is easily the entry into the newly fortified house. You can all scale the side of the building, push off the wall and burst through a row of windows all at the same time. It’s a very satisfying feeling.

Like any tactical shooter communication is incredibly important. Playing with random media at E3 is probably not the best environment but its was apparent early that if we wanted any chance of victory we needed to talk to each other an strategize.

I know this was just an early E3 demo, in fact a pre-alpha, but if Siege is to have any kind of staying power and there’d better be a lot of content and variation in the final game. It manages to distinguish itself from the plethora of FPS titles inundating the gaming industry by melding old tricks with new ideas but if its too repetitive it wont last long.

While its not the sort of game that usually gets my attention it was so easy to pick up I didn’t want to put it down. I never thought I could feel so comfortable out of my comfort zone.

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege will be available for Windows PC, Xbox One and PS4 in 2015.