Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege

So if you’re looking for a tense, difficult, team focused first person shooter this holiday season, I’d urge you to check out Rainbow Six Siege. While it lacks a suitable campaign, it more than makes up for it with its exciting versus and coop modes.

Many people wanted a different shooter and Rainbow Six Siege is just that. Although it's a product that should be expanded with more maps, modes and other agents to hold up well in the long term, Ubisoft has here a very powerful proposition on its hands. The game demands to be played with teammates who speak the same language. It isn't for everyone. It's for those seeking a realistic shot, with nerves of steel and accuracy.

Impossible to recommend as a single-player game. Siege is an absolutely splendid multiplayer shooter for well-organised (and forgiving) teams, with great tactical terrain destruction. [Feb 2016, p.86]

A slight but superior multiplayer experience. What it lacks in single-player content, Rainbow Six Siege makes up in sheer quality. Just remember to use voice chat. [Issue#265, p.76]

Despite its flaws, Rainbow Six: Siege has emerged as one of the strongest FPS titles of the year.

But that focus is what makes Siege’s multiplayer so good. In a year with a glut of good competitive first-person shooters –the sci-fi fizz of Halo 5 and Star Wars Battlefront or bombastic ordnance of Battlefield Hardline and Call of Duty: Black Ops III- Rainbow Six Siege’s smart, sharp tactical nous marks it as one of the best.

There's a lot of depth and strategy to be found in Rainbow Six: Siege, especially when you're playing with a headset. However, the lack of content is something to be considered when pondering the game's retail price.

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege serves as a breath of fresh air against an overwhelming fog of twitch shooters. The drop of a traditional campaign is not reflected in the price, and yet the new Scenarios are just as tough as any campaign in previous entries, and easily as rewarding.

While its slow deliberate pace won't be for everyone, if you're looking for shooter that's trying something different, then the impressive destructibility and intense close-quarters battles will almost certainly bring the house down.

Despite including several different game types and modes, Ubisoft clearly designed Rainbow Six Siege with a very specific kind of player in mind. If you have an abundance of patience, fortitude, and maybe a few gamer friends you can wrangle up, Siege could be just the tactical shooter experience you’re looking for. If you’re looking for a fun game you can kick back with and enjoy in a more casual way, you might want to look elsewhere.

My experiences weren't always perfect, but when Siege works, there's nothing else like it. It's not designed to appeal to all players, and that's exactly what allows it to be something special. With so much strategic depth, those periods between firefights actually become some of the most rewarding, while firefights themselves are made all the more intense by the knowledge that you're fighting for your life, not just your kill/death ratio.

Rainbow Six Siege isn't exactly the full return to form we were hoping for after seven years of dormancy, but it's still worth the wallet breach if you're willing to dedicate yourself to the craft and are able to find a few friends.

An FPS where your weapon should be the last thing you use, not the first, Rainbow Six Siege is a fantastic tactical shooter.

Rainbow Six siege may not be the Rainbow game fans remember, but it lays a solid foundation for the future. Matches are full of constant tension and meaningful kills. Its reliance on having a dedicated group might be off-putting for some, but the heavy emphasis on teamwork is a refreshing focus.

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege knows exactly what it wants to be, and it’s not necessarily something that will likely appeal to a particularly broad swath of players...It’s a small, focused, and intense game with but a handful of maps, modes, and playable characters. Clearly designed for a niche group of first-person shooter fans interested in teamwork, tactics, and authenticity, it entertains with the challenge of honing skills and strategies rather than jamming a mountain of mostly middling content down players’ throats, as so many other shooters seem eager to do...But that means it won’t be for everyone – especially not those who want to play alone.

Refreshingly different.

Intense and a refreshing change of pace for a shooter, but only if you have the right team beside you.

With its new environmental destruction system and different Operators, R6: Siege makes you create your own tactics and strike in your own ways. But it has a great potential which is not completely utilized.

Rainbow Six Siege is a great game to break from the lone-wolf kind of shooter. This means relying on random players or on having a team ready, but if you're ok with that, it is a great experience.

The gameplay is solid as a rock; super intense, exciting and porn for the tactical shooter fan. But the game quickly loses its power when you stray among the other game modes, which are limited and lacking good AI. This is what they call: too little content for too much money. [Dec. 2015, p.054]

Rainbow Six Siege offers a very different FPS experience. It doesn’t rely on bombastic set pieces and ceaseless, mindless action where players respawn immediately and everyone has Wolverine-like regenerating health. Instead, this is the cerebral shooter, the one that asks you to view the map layout, determine the best plan of attack, and execute with pinpoint precision.

A multiplayer tactical shooter with a lot of potential but still a bit 'sour to be enjoyed in every way. Some honest advice? Play it only with trusted friends.

Siege, for all its strengths and weaknesses, is a quintessential 2015 shooter. Each round is short and to-the-point to avoid any trace of boredom; the whole thing is geared towards online play.

The multiplayer is superb when it comes together, but the game lacks enough variation to be a true classic.

Rainbow Six: Siege delivers on what it promised to be: a well-made, multiplayer-focused, team shooter. To criticize it for not having a stronger single player experience is accusing it of a pretense it never made, and consumers will decide whether the product has broad enough appeal to warrant its price.

Siege is both unforgivably callow and inarguably satisfying. Like parades or fireworks, it’s a vision that’s only fun if you can forget where it comes from and where it points to.

The multiplayer core at the heart of Rainbow Six Siege is a great foundation. But given its lack of infrastructure around the mode and severe lack of meaningful modes to buttress it, Siege feels slight when compared to its past entries and the other big-name first-person shooter franchises it competes against.

One of the best multiplayer experiences of the year, but the cost of entry and the lack of content make it a harder sell then it should be.

Rainbow Six: Siege is visually poor, technically underpowered and multiplayer only. It's very far from being a great game, but with the right friends could be an heartbreaking fun.

Rainbow Six Siege is a good FPS at its gameplay core thanks to good level design, but the lack of content and imprecise controls makes it a completely forgettable game.

Rainbow Six: Siege has the basic pieces in place to offer that experience but sabotages them by forcing the illusion to rub against the real world in ways the fantasy isn’t prepared to handle. More often than not, playing Siege, one doesn’t feel like a soldier. You feel like a player. And that’s precisely what this game doesn’t want.

The core of Rainbow Six Siege is great – it’s a game I want to absolutely adore. But it’s just not a game I can recommend right now. Not at this price. Not with Ubisoft’s chicanery.

Siege can feel cool and inhospitable, but when the conditions are right and you're playing with friends, the game's tense gameplay and measured pacing makes for a refreshing, cerebral contrast to the run-and-gun hyperactivity of most online shooters. [Feb 2016, p.104]

The game’s multiplayer foundation is undoubtedly solid, but it lacks supporting elements that would compel esports enthusiasts, let alone Rainbow Six fans, from investing time in Siege many months from now. Whatever time you do manage to spend, there are rewards to be found through tactical planning and execution that you can’t find in any other shooter.

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege has the polish of a big budget release, but the amount of content that one expects to see from a low budget free-to-play game.

Beyond the basic freeform variety with which players can infiltrate each of the 10 maps, there's no compelling reason to do so.

Without a single player campaign and only a small selection of effectively interchangeable game modes, Rainbow Six Siege is a game with a fairly limited scope. However, there’s still a solid and very enjoyable tactical shooter at its core, especially when played with friends, and it’s one which will only grow over time as Ubisoft add more maps and content.

This could have been a triumphant return for Rainbow Six, even with the true single-player experience stripped out, but bad decision after bad decision helps to bury the potential and leave Siege D.O.A.