You'd be hard pressed to find an FPS fan in their 20s who hasn’t played at least one of the Tom Clancy Rainbow Six games. The series has been a staple on the PC since the first Pentium computers hit the market. Rainbow Six Siege is the most ambitious title yet, with a strong focus on squad based combat and creative solutions via destructible environments.

When you first fire up Rainbow Six Siege it becomes very clear that this is a game you want to be playing with people you can count on. Every scenario requires careful planning and execution that wont happen if you can’t communicate with your team, or you just don’t get along with them. Find some buddies and assemble your crack squad.

Speaking of communication, there was one major item missing from Siege that had been present in almost all of the other Rainbow titles. The pre-mission planning portion has been completely removed. If you want to do some planning, you better do it quickly at the start of the match, or organize yourself before. Some game modes do have a short sequence where you will be tasked with piloting a drone around the battlefield, but it’s not available everywhere.

Custom Solutions

The destructible environment in Siege opens the door to many different solutions to the same problem. Do you sneak your way through the hallways of a building hoping to catch the enemy by surprise using stealth? Or do you opt for the shock and awe tactic, blowing a hole in the wall before quickly breaching and clearing each room.

How you approach a situation will also depend on the composition of your team. There are several different types of operators you can choose from, each of which will have their own specialty and kit. You will unlock more operators for use as you progress in rank through the game.

Whether playing against AI opponents or real players, the destructible environment can make for some real mayhem. You’ll never feel completely safe knowing that the wall you’re hiding behind could come down at any moment followed by a hail of bullets.

Operators

The operators represent several of the major special forces units in the world. The game promotes trying new nationalities by making subsequent purchases of the same one cost more. If you unlock a rank 1 SAS operator, the next SAS purchase will cost twice as much as one from another special forces.

Instead of changing your kit composition like CoD or Battlefield, most of the customization is locked to the different operators. You can customize each operators kit somewhat, but you can’t completely change their specialization. Luckily there are so many operators that you’re likely to find at least one specialization/ character combo that you enjoy.

A Little Variety

For those that want the slower paced single player experience you can have one with the game’s Situations. There are 10 total that serve more as a sort of tutorial than a stand alone campaign. During the Situations you will fight through all of the different game modes available in multiplayer.

Multiplayer game modes run the gambit from hostage scenarios to bomb defusal missions which can be played against other real players or AI goombas. Both offer an action packed technical thrill, but the player vs. player attack/ defense game mode is where things get really intense.

Teams take turns attacking and defending across 4 rounds. The defenders must prtect the hostage/bomb/other object while the attacking team has a certain amount of time to take out the defenders and secure the objective. Each match is dynamic and different as the defending team gets an array of gadgets they can place to defend the objective, like razor wire and proximity based explosives. Attackers also have an arsenal to choose from full of explosives and flash bangs, but they have the added responsibility of ensuring the objective remains alive/ intact.

A well formed plan is not only essential, it’s extremely rewarding when it works.

Overall Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege is a little more “shootery” than many fans of the franchise will like, but it is undoubtedly a fun game to play, especially if you find a regular group of buddies to play with. If you don’t have that core squad of operators, there’s no other game right now that will form a bond faster than Rainbow Six Siege.