Is Rainbow Six Siege Single-Player Worth It?

Ubisoft’s tactical multiplayer shooter Rainbow Six Siege has been around since the very end of 2015, and with seven years worth of content, there’s a lot for new or lapsed players to currently sink their teeth into. Due to sales, subscriptions and reduced prices for older games, there’s still plenty of fresh meat making their way into the world of Siege, but if you’re someone who loves solo content, is Rainbow Six Siege worth playing in single-player?

Rainbow Six Siege only has two modes that allow players to enjoy the game in single-player, offline scenarios: Training Grounds and Situations. If you want to get the most out of your game of Siege, playing online multiplayer is the way to do so. The worst part is that these single-player modes don’t offer any kind of transformative, new gameplay you can’t see in the multiplayer experience.

In order to best explain the Situations mode, it’s important to first discuss the Training Grounds mode. If you’ve played a Rainbow Six game in the past, like Vegas for instance, Training Grounds will be immediately familiar. Training Grounds allows up to five players to drop into any of the game’s multiplayer maps and either take out every single terrorist, or complete a series of objectives. Training Grounds missions come in four separate variants, which are:

– Elimination (take out all the terrorists)
– Extract Hostage (find a hostage in the level, procure them and then make it to the exfiltration point)
– Protect Hostage (the only Training Grounds missions where you can play as defenders, must stop terrorists from killing the hostage)
– Disarm Bomb (players must disarm the two bombs located on the map while being swarmed by terrorists)

While these modes and missions are designed for five player co-op, they can be played solo using the Lone Wolf setting. There’s even three separate difficulty settings which adjust how accurate the AI is, along with how much damage they do. It’s certainly an option for single-player content, and Training Grounds can be great for players looking to warm up before jumping into matchmaking, but it’s too restrictive and repetitive to be worth it on its own.

The main single-player mode is Situations, which can be found in the Learning Area section of the game. The Situations mode acts as the story/campaign of sorts for Rainbow Six Siege, as well as a tutorial for the Training Grounds mode and thus Siege proper. Situations sees the Rainbow Six team formed in order to counter specific terrorist threats across the globe, with the mode culminating in a chemical weapons attack on an American university by an organisation known as the White Masks.

Before getting to that point, players will have to complete a series of 10 escalating missions, which play out on the various multiplayer maps found within the game. Players will find the maps filled with White Mask terrorists, and will have to complete a series of various objectives in order to complete the Situation. All 10 situations will also have bonus stipulations for players to earn stars, and the structure of the missions slowly introduces you to mechanics unique to Siege like breaching, rappelling and so on.

Upon completion of the 10 situations, you’ll unlock Article Five, the special endgame mission of Situations that takes place on a modified version of the Bartlett University map. However, in order to access this mission, you’ll need to enter matchmaking and find four other players so that you can complete the Situations mode. This makes the mode impossible to finish for players who just want to experience the single-player content of Rainbow Six Siege.

The Learning Area also contains the Shooting Range, a contained space where players can practice using the guns and operators that Siege offers in a safe environment, customising the range’s parameters to suit their needs. Like the rest of Rainbow Six Siege’s single-player content, it’s not enough to sustain a player’s interest long term, but it does serve a specific purpose.

The reason why there’s such a lack of single-player content in Rainbow Six Siege is because the content that’s there is designed to push you towards its most enticing aspect: the online multiplayer. The maps and objectives featured in Situations and Training Grounds are exactly the same as in the Multiplayer, and while the regular White Mask AI isn’t going to be a match for the cracked gamers you’ll find on the other team, those modes are a great way to limber up before you venture into matchmaking.

The only real incentive for touching the single-player content, aside from getting used to the controls or warming up, is the fact that playing these modes will bag you Renown that can be used to purchase operators and cosmetics. The amount you’ll gain won’t be as much as the amount you’d get for playing multiplayer, but it’ll give you a nice starting point, if nothing else. There’s also no achievements or trophies for playing the single-player content, as these were removed from the game and changed with more multiplayer focused challenges.

The Rainbow Six games of old featured plenty of exciting campaign and single-player levels, so fans of those games would probably be tempted to pick up Rainbow Six Siege, thinking there’s more where that came from. For those players, the reality is rather disappointing, but if you’re willing to try multiplayer eventually, the Siege single-player offerings here are a great way to get started.

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