Rainbow Six Siege Review

A seasonally updated review of the new Operators, maps and updated content for Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege.

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These days, December is almost as viable for end-of-year game releases than any of the preceding months. Officially, release season starts in August when the first big-name game goes on sale. It’s been that way for a while now, but it used to be the case that release season ended mid-November, around about the time the latest yearly iterating Call of Duty game dropped.

Rewind four years and December was where games went to die. After being resurrected from the ashes of sadly cancelled Rainbow Six: Patriots, delays, and the absence of marketing because of real-world terror attacks being too closely linked to the content of the game, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege released with more of a pop than a bang in December 2015.

At launch, the potential was there, but it didn’t exactly set the world on fire. Today, Siege has a player base of more than 55 million registered fraggers across PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 in its fifth year of ongoing live-service support. And as one of the few titles available at launch for both the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, we thought it was time to revisit Rainbow Six: Siege with an updated review for 2021.

Siege presents like a shooter but, really, it’s a MOBA-shooter, in that order. Like Overwatch, Siege is a team-based game that’s comprised of a roster of unique ‘heroes’. Unlike Overwatch, Siege’s lethality is high – a single headshot frags an enemy player (or a friendly player, for that matter) – and teams are asynchronous.

Siege’s heroes are called Operators, and they’re broken down into attacking and defending roles, where only one Operator can be selected per team. These Operators have one unique gadget or ability and are ranked in terms of three stat tiers of armour and speed. They also share a pool of regular attacking/defending gadgets and a large arsenal of weapons. Siege operators are unlocked by buying a pricier version of the game, investing dollars in the yearly season pass, purchasing them with in-game currency, or grinding your way to enough in-game credits (Renown) to unlock them.

The names of different Siege editions have changed over the years, but the game can be bought in cheapest form where you unlock Operators through the above pathways. Alternatively, you can fork out extra for the Deluxe Edition (includes Year 1 and 2 Operators), Gold Edition (Year 1 and 2 Operators and a Year 5 pass), or Ultimate Edition (Operators for Years 1, 2, 3 and 4 plus a Year 5 season pass).

Siege may as well be called Counter-Strike 2.0 because of the way it plays. Two teams of five are placed in attacking or defending roles. Unlike Counter-Strike, there’s a preparation phase where defenders reinforce destructible walls and hatches, place down other defensive countermeasures, and prepare for attack. Attackers spend this phase on drones and are tasked with collecting intel about the location of the main area/s of interest and the defensive Operators they’re coming up against.

Defenders are unable to leave the structure they’re tasked with defending. Doing so in the preparation phase means they’re instantly killed, and they’re marked for all attackers after two seconds if they run out during the main round (though risky, this is a viable strategy).

There are three main multiplayer modes in Siege: Secure Area, Bomb, and Hostage. Certain matchmaking playlists limit these modes to Bomb, the main one, which is Counter-Strike’s iconic Demolition mode in reverse: instead of the attacking team planting a bomb, they’re planting a defuser.

A round is won by the defenders if time runs out for the attackers to plant a defuser, secure the area, or rescue the hostage, with overtime allowances for any of those actions that are currently in progress after the round timer hits zero. Attackers win the round by completing those objectives, and either team can win by wiping out the other team.

Unlike Counter-Strike or most other competitive shooters, Siege has a big emphasis on destructibility. This means players can be shot through ‘soft’ walls, ceilings and floors, while that same soft cover can also be partially or completely destroyed to create new ‘rotation’ pathways or lines of sight. Because of this, Siege has a fantastic sense of three-dimensionality in terms of combat and intelligence gathering, whereby it’s viable to attack or defend from above, below, or beside an objective. This leads to a lot of variety of strategies and outcomes when playing the same maps over and over again.

Siege launched with about as much potential as it had pitfalls. It was buggy. The all-important netcode wasn’t up to scratch. Matchmaking and servers were both unstable. None of these are the kind of cons you want in a game that’s mostly about online play and pitched as a live-service offering. But even amid these negatives, the core gameplay loop was fantastic and the potential was clear.

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This was enough for me and many others to keep the game installed. But it wasn’t all a straight-line uphill trajectory from launch either, with more than a few moments of two steps forward, one step back. For instance, cheating was once rampant to the point where Ubisoft Montreal sagely introduced a second layer of anti-cheating technology.

The bugs in the game hit a point that Operation Health – a squash-the-bugs-focused update – was the core focus of one quarter, which would have otherwise been dedicated to the release of a new map and two new Operators.

At other times, new Operators like Lion have released in a ridiculously overpowered state, while others like Warden have felt underwhelming to the point where it’s difficult to justify selecting them. On top of this, there was an early trend towards releasing new maps for what felt like the sake of it.

Thankfully, this was later rectified to a smaller mix of new maps and a bigger focus on revamping the existing map pool, either in small or significant ways. This was a particularly savvy move by Ubisoft Montreal because the majority of the new maps haven’t proven to be overly popular.

That may read like a wall of negative, but it’s not so much the case these days because a lot of that has been addressed. There are still persistent bugs, or ones that are newly introduced with major updates, but those tend to be ironed out pretty quickly. Unlike Battlefield V or Anthem, Siege is a shining example of a live-service game where Ubisoft Montreal believes in community transparency (just look at the dev’s detailed patch notes for proof of this) and actively seeks to address problems as they happen.

This is evident in other key ways, too. Attachments used to cost Renown to unlock, and this task had to be performed for each attachment for every new Operator. Nowadays, attachments are unlocked automatically.

Operators have also had a massive expansion of their fictional backstories, evolving from a couple of throwaway sentences for two-dimensional avatars to full-fledged biographies that make them feel like three-dimensional characters. This, reportedly, was a result of fan interest. On top of this, though clearly a shooter that’s balanced from the top down in terms of the competitive scene, there was a push to show that Siege has more to offer than just player-versus-player (PvP) modes.

Operation Chimera might’ve given the Siege community the imbalanced (at the time) Lion, but it also offered a fun-but-short timed co-op event called Outbreak. This idea was repeated in Year 4, albeit in a smaller way, with the Wild West-themed 3v3 showdown Fort Truth.

The fourth year of Siege’s post-launch content releases started with a bang. For years we’d been asking, and finally Ubisoft Montreal delivered Australian Operators. This meant the developer was finally able to make good on its claim that every continent was represented in its ever-expanding roster of Operators.

Thankfully, it was more than just ticking that box, too. Operation Burnt Horizon saw the introduction of two incredibly viable new operators. Mozzie is a popular defender choice, thanks to his ability to hijack drones, while attacker Gridlock’s anti-roamer gadget provides a peace of mind that ninja-like defenders can’t sneak up on you unannounced.

Operation Burnt Horizon was also significant because it saw the introduction of the Newcomer playlist. One of the biggest cons of Siege is found within its biggest pro: more new content adds depth for the existing player base, but that depth incredibly intimidating for newcomers. The Newcomer playlist lets players below level 50 compete within the deliberately restricted confines of one mode and three core maps.

This is a great space for newcomers to learn the PvP rappelling ropes, even if these friendlier waters have the potential to turn frustratingly bloody for greenhorns when ‘smurf’-account sharks hunt in these waters during the regularly occurring free weekends, weeks or – as of September 2019 (care of the free Uplay+ trial) – longer free-to-play periods.

A similar criticism can be levelled against the so-called Casual playlist, particularly during free periods, where it’s a mix of casual fans, elite sweaty players, and newcomers who missed the memo about the Newcomer playlist. Ubisoft Montreal really should consider fully incentivising or even forcing newbies to stay in the Newcomer playlist until level 50, unless they’re budding up with friends beyond that level in Casual.

Mercifully, it was around the time of Operation Burnt Horizon that the controversial and grind-heavy Starter Edition was removed from PC. Those players who’d purchased it were automatically upgraded to the Standard Edition.