Rainbow Six Extraction gameplay is here

Tactical alien action

Rainbow Six is getting back to its tactical co-op roots, sort of. The newest entry in the series is Rainbow Six Extraction and it will pit players against hordes of mutated aliens, but ... tactically. The game’s latest footage was shown on Saturday during Ubisoft’s E3 2021 presentation.

The trailer starts off by giving us a bit of background on where the alien nightmare came from. An asteroid of some kind crashes to Earth and apparently starts infecting people all around the world. The trailer then follows a small squad of special ops soldiers from around the world as they try to extra one of their own from the hands of the aliens. Things seem to be going well, before the squad gets ambushed by an Apex and a few other special aliens that seem more dangerous than the rest.

Rainbow Six Extraction was originally announced in 2019 as a spin-off for Rainbow Six Siege’s Outbreak mode, a co-op mode where players fought through hordes of mutant AI enemies — instead of the series’ usual vague terrorists. The game was also originally going to be called Rainbow Six Quarantine, but after 2020’s pandemic, Ubisoft changed the name to Extraction. Extraction is developed by a new team at Ubisoft Montreal.

Just like Outbreak, the new Rainbow Six game blends the series’ tactical slow-paced roots with the character-based action of the Rainbow Six Siege. Extraction will let players hunt down — or escape from — infected aliens together as a squad of up to three, similar to the earliest games in the series, but will let players do this while playing as the unique Operators that players already know and love from Siege — including characters like Ela, Ash, and Hibana.

Rainbow Six Extraction is set to be released on is set to be released on Sept. 16 on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. The game will also include cross-play, letting players squad up across different platforms.