Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege

What Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege lacks in content it makes up for in intense, fast-paced, heart-pounding action and tight gameplay. If tactical multiplayer is your thing, there may be none better. If not, though, you’ll likely find the experience to be a bit bare bones.

Tense, dramatic and unique, Rainbow Six: Siege feels and plays unlike any other shooter on the market. It’s not perfect but it can be great fun. We just wish there was more of it.

As intricate as the multiplayer is, the lack of a true campaign or other content beyond terrorist hunt leaves the entire Rainbow Six Siege package of offerings feeling somewhat light, especially in comparison to something like Call of Duty: Black Ops III, which has a campaign and zombies to go along with its signature shooter experience.

When it all comes together, Rainbow Six Siege offers some of the best multiplayer action you'll experience this generation, but the anaemic content and lack of a cohesive single player campaign mar what should be one of this year's best shooters.

Fans of the well-crafted, single-player campaigns of previous Rainbow Six games will find nothing of value in Siege. The short tutorial missions lack replay value, and the popular Terrorist Hunt mode, which can be played with up to five friends, gives players little options other than ramping up the difficulty. Locking players out of selecting the map they want to play on is a curious decision, as are many of the battle tactics you see the enemy A.I. employ.

Underneath the silly cash grab lies a genuinely fun multiplayer game. Siege took me back to the early days of Counter-Strike, when I would lose weeks at a time to endless late night sessions with friends. Find some buddies and Siege really settles in as thrilling game of calculated chaos. But between the paltry offline offerings and the slow, microtransaction-gated drip of goodies, I wouldn’t advise breaching this door alone.

Rainbow Six: Siege is an intelligent and quality shooter that allows for varied approaches. It is, however, unfortunately held back by repetition, server issues and a noticeable lack of variety. Fans of the genre should definitely look into it, and be mindful of the fact that lots of free DLC is planned, but not everyone will fall in love with its design.

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege is a very attractive game that clearly had some effort put into the visuals. Beyond that, the title offers more tactical gameplay than most shooters on the market. The biggest sin that the game commits is that it just offers so little overall content.

The bizarre progression hooks Siege borrows from free-to-play games, its dearth of content and its network problems make for an awful lot of frustration to overcome in search of those rare moments of unit cohesion.