Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege Review

Multiplayer:

I’ve said it once, I’ll say it a million times. For a game that’s mostly online, the matchmaking and server stability has to be top notch, even at launch. Unfortunately that’s simply not the case for Siege, at least in my own experience. Terrorist Hunt just failed to let me into a game online completely over the launch weekend, whilst at other points, standard multiplayer games would be ended by the host quitting (ever heard of host migration or dedicated servers, Ubisoft?), or suffer from slow performance. At least once you do find a game, the actual performance when playing was faultless, but there’s many a lesson to be learnt from Battlefront or Call of Duty about how to do this right here …

Presentation:

Siege makes a really poor first visual impression. Sure, it looks prettier than in the beta, but the image quality seems soft, many of the textures fairly bland, whilst the levels are small and compact. Once you play, you realise that all of the effort has gone into the performance of the game, keeping it at a constant 60 frames per second, whilst coping with the excellent physics and destruction capabilities of the game.

The levels are almost a sandbox in how the defences can be setup, and the amount of walls, ceilings, floors etc. that can be blown up by your charges and explosives is really impressive. The operators look great, and are animated with impressive realism, and the lighting and shadow models are also worthy of praise.

It’s a slow burn, but through the course of my time with Siege, I learnt to really appreciate the work that’s gone into the game, even if it doesn’t have the same instant appeal of say The Witcher 3, or the bombastic elements of Call of Duty.

Conclusion:

Rainbow Six: Siege is a pretty interesting tactical shooter. Much improved, both graphically and gameplay-wise from the beta, it provides a unique destruction model that means no two matches are ever likely to be the same. However, much like Star Wars Battlefront, the decision to cut back single player gameplay to the minimum possible, whilst not having a massively increased roster of maps makes it feel like a fairly sparse package at the moment. Combined with some fairly nasty server issues, and I’m in two minds about the game. If money’s no object, and you’ve got the patience, R6: Siege plays really well. But given the glut of other high-quality titles released in the last few weeks, it wouldn’t be my first choice at the minute. Give the game some time to overcome the server issues, and maybe pick it up at a bit of a discount in the New Year.