Rainbow Six Extraction Xbox was announced in a world we no longer live in: the world of 2019. Back then, the co-op Siege spinoff FPS was called "Rainbow Six Quarantine" (ha!). It was an unlucky time to be making a game about a parasitic virus, but a great time to bring back the dormant co-op zombie shooter. Siege's 2018 Outbreak event was a brief but excellent taste of what Left 4 Siege could be, and I hoped Extraction would blow that 2-hour mode out into a sprawling collection of campaigns.
Three years later, not only is Extraction one of many co-op shooters on the block, but it's hardly recognizable from the original Outbreak campaign. It's the anti-Left 4 Dead—a precise, grueling survival game about keeping your head down and never poking the bear. If you do, Extraction's sadistic AI takes over, eager to punish the smallest lapse in judgment.
It's a mean game that can produce some great thrills, but its strict rules make some awkward design choices stick out. Extraction is also a smaller game than I anticipated—Ubi's decision to lower its price to $40 and introduce it to PC Game Pass at launch makes sense now. I really liked mastering each of the dozen objective types and maps, but missions start to get the samey really fast.
Rainbow Six Extraction Xbox Screech and clear
Extraction missions are, at their core, maps with three objectives randomly pulled from a pool of 12. Objectives have to be tackled in order, with each one occupying its own chunk of the map.
Your squad of three (or just you, if you're flying solo) are dropped into these locales with no other context than the current task at hand. There's no campaign with connecting goals like "find the safe room" or "cross this rickety bridge." You simply do the job and get out with as much XP as possible. During the first 10 hours, when I was learning how each objective worked and trying out operators, the sparse format worked. Every mission was throwing one or two obstacles my way I hadn't seen before, be it a new alien enemy (called Archaeans) that can plant sneaky flash bombs or a modifier that makes the black "Sprawl" goo slowly coating every surface hazardous to step on.
I also died a lot early on, way more than I usually do when I pick up a new FPS. It took a while to realize you can't play Extraction like other co-op shooters. Where Back 4 Blood is about managing hordes while running to the next goal, sprinting around a building full of Archaeans is asking for death.
My squad was always better off when we crouched or walked everywhere, carefully choosing which enemies to engage or avoid. The format is seemingly inspired by the stealthy gameplay of GTFO, a survival horror co-op shooter that recently escaped early access. Operators can go down in just a few hits from Archaeans, and even if they survive an encounter, they can never get lost health back permanently. Health can be temporarily restored by medkits or gadgets like Doc's stim pistol, but it fades over time. This fragility builds tension as we step deeper into enemy territory trying not to alert an Archaean long enough for it to scream. A screaming Archaean is kinda like alerting the witch in Left 4 Dead, except way worse because every nearby nest starts spawning enemies until destroyed.