Rainbow Six: Siege - Beta Impressions

With the explosives and tools at your disposal and the way your bullets stagger enemies lead you to believe that aggressive breaches at the answer. This is possible, but a quick assault means wading through jumbles of barbed wire and well hidden proximity mines, and rooting out the armed assailants crouching in cover at various places throughout the building.

So you switch things up - you take it slowly: teasing out the resistance and clearing the obstructions slowly as you pick the defence apart.



Until you meet the Bomber, that is.

He's a direct counter to a methodical playstyle, charging towards you with heavy armour before detonating himself and everything around him in a lethal explosion. You take him down fast or you sprint away to safety. He's the perfect example of the way Siege disrupts your playstyle and keeps you on your toes. He manages to force you out of position to survive, and then blows up all of the cover around you. Cover is good. It stops all of the bullets from being introduced to your soft and fleshy body.

The concept of a 'suicide bomber' is jarring, it's a bad fit for the Rainbow Six universe, which has typically steered clear of this sort of thing - a two dimension 'terrorist' charging into you just to blow himself up feels ridiculous and many of the early deaths to this explosive juggernaut felt cheap.

Over time you start to work out tips and tricks to deal with him: a few rounds to the head will put him down easy, while a shot to the explosive vest adorning his chest will detonate the explosion early - which is a dangerous as it sounds, but conceptually is still a bit gross. I know it's something of a trope now, but it's not one I'm a fan of.



As it's a multiplayer game after the year 2008, there are unlocks, but these seem fairly reigned in - it's hard to talk about the economy of unlocks in a Beta as these will probably need some tweaking, but I unlocked everything I needed for one attack and defense class within 30 minutes of multiplayer play. The adversarial mode gives you more points, but it's also the only point in the demo I got to use my defensive operatives, so I would have been happy to just play the Terrorist Hunt gameplay mode.

There's a few game modes still to come and plenty of extra maps to ship with the actual game. I'd like to believe the game's delay till December is to take feedback from the Beta on board so there may still be a few tweaks to come, but I feel confident that the game will deliver.

Small note: The matchmaking servers were terrible through the Beta. This isn't a gigantic issue because /it's a beta/, but it made it tricky to get a game in several cases and the full release needs to ensure this is fixed by launch.