After casting envious glances over at YouTube when everyone one and their dads seemed to be playing the closed beta of Rainbow Six Siege, I finally had the chance to spend six hour with the open beta over the weekend. It looked like it ticked all the boxes: tight action, a fantastic squad system that depended on teamwork and hanging upside down from a rappel, something that makes every Ross Kemp enthusiast a bit soft in the belly.
When it came to actually playing the game, though, I was left a little disappointed. And not because the servers were about as efficient as a goldfish copywriter.
Before I launch into things, it might be seen as a bit of a folly to criticise a product that’s not fully finished. However, if there’s anything I have learned during two years of gaming coverage for Cultured Vultures, it’s that a beta in the AAA world is often nothing more than a marketing exercise to have consumers interested in a game with the foolproof backup of “oh, it’s just a beta” to excuse any bugs in the meantime. Considering how the full game is going to be released literally tomorrow, it’s highly doubtful that any issues that cropped up in Rainbow Six Siege’s beta will be addressed.
As a franchise, Rainbow Six has been all about tactics since the original game came out in 1998 and that ethos still remains with Siege. Playing either as attackers or defenders, you must team up with other players in claustrophobic environments to fight to the last man or until an objective is met. Think less Call of Duty, more an arena shooter with bells and whistles that go boom.
The bells and whistles in Siege are initially impressive, doing well to cover some of the failings in the core mechanics. It reminded me a lot of Evolve, a similar arena shooter with an interesting gimmick that quickly faded from memory once the sheen had worn off. Rappelling up buildings before breaching through windows, putting up cover to shield yourself from enemy fire and using RC cars to find enemies and objectives are just a few of the little touches that make Siege seem decent to begin with. However, just like watching your monster doing An American Werewolf in London during a round of Evolve for the umpteenth time becomes tiresome, so too does it become tiresome in Siege to start each round with a Micro Machines minigame. There just isn’t a great deal of variety; a blow for a game that doesn’t come with any kind of single player experience that’s worth getting excited about.
The core mechanics in Siege are decent, but nothing spectacular. It has all the trappings of a modern FPS in that you can choose your loadouts before the game and unlock more as you progress (read: kill the things). A lot of extra content seems to be gated off, making me worried that Ubisoft have followed 2K’s lead again by focusing heavily on DLC. Honestly though, I don’t think Siege offers enough to warrant a purchase at full price, let alone extra money to unlock different shades of brown for your helmet.
In Siege‘s defense, the main meat of what it does, it does well. Matches are tense, frantic and full of close calls, leading to one or two swearing sessions with teammates. Siege does a fantastic job of making you panic – watching your team fall around you before leaving you as the sole survivor is as adrenaline-pumping an experience I have had with a game in 2015. It’s just a shame that truly competitive matches are few and far between; your squad members have a happy habit of running off on their own like Rambo and John McClane on speed, leaving you handicapped and one shooter short when they inevitably get themselves killed.
Presentation is what every AAA developer seems obsessed with in this age of gaming, so it was quite surprising that Siege is just so…bland. It looks like it would run fairly smoothly on a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360; there’s a certain vanilla quality to all the textures and stages, which could be forgiven if it had the killer gameplay to match. The less I mention the way you seem to run as if you’re wading through the bins of a Wetherspoon’s after a Friday night, the better.
Whether extra polish is added to Siege before the 1st of December remains to be seen, but based on what I have seen so far, it might just be best to watch out for it on eBay in a couple of months time.
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