Here is a little look into the Rainbow Six Siege beta which I have had the pleasure of playing on the PlayStation 4. Rainbow Six Siege is under development by Ubisoft Montreal and is to be published by Ubisoft itself. Siege uses Ubisoft’s AnvilNext game engine. It’s a first person tactical shooter, in which players take control of operators from the Rainbow team, a counter-terrorist unit.
There are many good things about Rainbow Six Siege. The gameplay is very much realistic to the fact that you can team kill, bullets do a lot of damage instead of having to put a large number of them into someone and also you have to work as a team to win. The two multiplayer game modes on the beta are TDM Secure (which if attacking you need to get into the room and secure it or defend it on the defending team) and TDM Bomb (which there are two bombs that the attacking team need to defuse and the defending team need to defend) which both flow very well. The only issue with these on the beta is that you can’t pick what game mode to play, not a very big issue as the game modes are fairly similar but it would be nice to pick which one you prefer.
When playing these two game modes, you are 5v5. The style is amazing, a lot different than any other shooter I’ve played for a long time. The animations for putting breaching charges on walls are very swift and quiet. Even when you are planting it the character you are playing seems to whisper in delight that you are blowing a hole into the wall, garage door or window. Most animations flow very well, I particularly like it when you lay on the floor and when your legs get too close to a wall your whole body shifts so you are laying on your back. Another good point is even though the beta has 3 maps, these three maps were played in both day and night time scenarios. During gameplay the Dualshock 4 controller light bar changes through your health, so if you are full health it is green, if you are half health it goes yellow and if you are down on the floor waiting to be revived, it flashes red.
There is also another game mode called Terrorist Hunt. This game mode is a co-op up to 4 people against AI. In Terrorist Hunt you have to think a lot more tactically than you do on TDM Secure and TDM Bomb. In this game mode you do run out of ammunition pretty quick but on every floor of the buildings you do have ammo crates so you can stock back up. Terrorist hunt comes in 3 difficulty levels, Normal, Hard and Realistic. The higher up difficulty you get the more friendly fire damage is, the higher the AI accuracy gets and the more enemies you have. You have general terrorists which just shoot you when you go near them or you have suicide bombers. You can tell if these are nearby without having to see them because you can hear them breathing through gas masks. The suicide bombers have more health/armour than the normal terrorists do but as long as you keep your distance you will be fine, but beware, they do run pretty fast towards you and they do some pretty horrible damage! Even to the buildings!
Now, as expected, betas do come with some minor issues but it is a work in progress and this will not be speaking for the final release of the game so please remember that! As some people who got guaranteed beta access will know, Ubisoft sent the game codes out in waves, from Thursday the 24th September. For some people it took a few days for their code to be emailed, I got my code on the evening of Friday 25th but the game took a full day to download. A lot of people were moaning about this but it was only a slight thing because Ubisoft wanted to slowly increase the usage of their servers to see how they would cope. Now the only worrying issue with the beta is match making which Ubisoft said right from the start there would be issues with this and they put out a update to sort it but there still is some issues. Sometimes you can get errors pop up randomly too whilst match making but it’s nothing too bad. I’m surprised there isn’t many more issues, only some tiny problems which I’m sure will be ironed out before release, for example, the last kill cam can sometimes be a random clip from someone else on the game. But it is a work in progress and this is why people do closed betas.
Overall, after the issues at the start of the beta with the codes taking a while to reach people, I wasn’t really expecting much from the game but in all honesty I am really looking forward to buying it on release. The gameplay flows very well, animations for movements flow even better. Everything in the game works well with each other. There may be some minor issues but I’m sure these will be all sorted for the release of the game on December 1st 2015. However, Ubisoft said that the game is not getting a single player which I myself was looking forward to as of the kind of tactical gameplay and it would have been different styled to anything else out. If you haven’t had access to the beta and are looking at getting Rainbow Six Siege, the beta has been extended till the 4th October 2015 and a lot more codes are now available which were emailed to existing beta testers so try get your hands on it!
