The tension before you breach a room in Rainbow Six Siege is often palpable. I’ll place a charge on one door while our sniper Glaz watches the windows from outside, and then wait for our teammate playing Dokkaebi to distract the enemies with a phone call before blowing it wide open. Coordination is key, and working together to get the most out of each our Operators’ abilities can be even more valuable as landing a good headshot – though the headshots definitely help.
Siege has come a long way since it launched two years ago. A steady stream of new maps, operators, and cosmetic items - along with a heaping helping of bug fixes, balance changes, and stability improvements - have slowly transformed it into a much deeper competitive game, even if there are some growing pains that come along with that. Siege has always been a fun and challenging FPS, but as it enters its third year it has gained a pull that’s become hard to resist.
The core of Siege hasn’t changed; a 5v5 dance of attack and defense between well-equipped military special forces squads on compact but complex maps. A wonderful emphasis on strategy and smart play over pure twitch aiming gives it a distinct feel that you don’t get from games like Call of Duty or Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Often times figuring out which door to barricade and which to break open can win you more games than just being able to outgun your opponents.
Learning which door to barricade can win you more games than just outgunning your opponent.
Each round of a match starts with a frantic race as one side sets up their defenses and the other hunts for intel with remote-controlled drones. It’s game of cat and mouse that often devolves into hilarious, Benny Hilly-style chases as the defenders try to deny the attackers of as much information as possible. It’s only a minute long, but there are a lot of subtle nuances in what walls to reinforce and where to place your traps that can differentiate the good players from the great.
Most of its levels are set in buildings with three stories, giving its gunfights a sense of height that many shooters lack. They’re also littered with destructible walls and floors, letting you create your own paths with breaching charges or even break small holes in defending walls to create new lines of sight. It makes Siege an immediately more accessible game, empowering you with the ability to improve your win rate through learning the maps alone, even if your aim doesn’t get any better.
There are currently 15 maps in the casual matchmaking queue, only nine of which are in ranked, each visually distinct and set in different locations across the globe, which results in a fantastic amount of variety every time I sit down to play. I love that I often won’t see the same map twice in an evening of games, but the flipside is that it takes longer to actually learn the layouts of those maps. Still, it’s a tradeoff that ultimately improves Siege.
Talking the Talk
Working with your teammates, either through voice chat, text, or just map markers and pings is a simple but extremely impactful thing you can do to get better at Siege. It can be a big ask to rely on the voices of internet strangers (and Siege definitely has its fair share of unfriendly and unhelpful players) but overall I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how this community understands and embraces good communication as a tool.
A great example of how communication can win games is with security cameras and drones. You can use cameras to mark the location of enemies for your whole team, but doing so will also warn the marked player that they’ve been seen, often resulting in them quickly hunting down and destroying that camera. But if you don’t mark enemies, and instead talk to your teammates and tell them where that person is, you can give them the same information without alerting your opponent. You can still use those same cameras after you’ve died too, which cleverly cuts out a lot of down-time as you continue to help any surviving teammates.
Of course, you’ll still run into plenty of people mindlessly tagging with cameras in public matchmaking. Like many competitive games, Siege is almost always more fun when played with friends I can comfortably coordinate with. Timing breaches and calling out flash grenades will let you get the drop on a defending team, but the short two to three-minute rounds and setup period between those tense moments also leaves room for goofing off in between.
Bringing the grenade-spraying Fuze into a Hostage situation is asking for trouble, so plan carefully.
Siege has just three PvP game modes, all of which revolve around one team protecting a room (or two rooms, in the case of the Bomb mode) and the other team trying to break through their defenses. They are different enough in subtle ways that influence what walls you want to reinforce or which operators you should use - for example, bringing the blind grenade-spraying Fuze into a Hostage situation is asking for trouble - but the general approach either team takes in a given mode can feel a little too similar.
As a side activity to the competitive battles there’s the PvE Terrorist Hunt mode and the single-player Situations. Both of these modes are great, and I often find myself warming up for PvP by taking on the AI first. The Situations are runs through the same multiplayer maps against AI, and can feel as compelling as a fully built-out single-player mission at times, which makes it a bit disappointing that we haven’t seen any new ones as everything else grows around it. (The first season of year three begins in March, and is expected to add a new kind of PvE mode called Outbreak, which will hopefully be a bit of what I’m hoping for.)
Role Call
Another way Siege has grown is its ever-expanding cast of Operators. Sixteen new characters have been added so far, which makes a current total of 36 with eight more coming in the next year. The result is more dynamic and varied matches, both in how you play and who you have to play against. Unlike the maps, it’s much easier to remember what each operator does, which helps the large roster not feel daunting to learn. You only really have to keep track of their special ability and what type of gun they might be using, but they’re still unique enough to leave ample room for different playstyles and strategies.
An operator like Mira completely changes the landscape of a map when picked, with the ability to put impenetrable one-way mirrors into otherwise solid walls. Other operators like Caveira, who can silence her footsteps and then interrogate downed enemies to learn the position of their teammates, or Vigil, who can become invisible to cameras and drones, are built to be played as aggressive, roaming defenders. Their presence enables new strategies that simply weren’t as viable at launch. Abilities like this have changed Siege in very real ways, and the increased options keep Siege from ever feeling repetitive.
Better still, the benefit of that variety can be felt even if you don’t have these new operators unlocked for yourself. I didn’t necessarily feel like I was at a disadvantage by not having any given character, as very few operators in Siege feel like either “must picks” or completely underpowered. I wished I could use certain locked operators, sure, but the 20 base operators that have been there from the beginning are still strong, fun, and varied enough to make the significantly higher Renown cost (Siege’s in-game currency) of any that came after them less frustrating.
You don’t start with any Operators unlocked, with the original 20 costing between 500 and 2,500 Renown, a relatively small amount that comes quickly enough from playing matches. All the new operators, however, are a massive 25,000. It can take at least 20 hours of play (on the low-end) to gather that much renown, but you also have the option to buy operators with real money for $5 a pop.
With only eight released in a year, 25,000 renown isn’t so hard to collect for regular players who have kept up to date, but it’s pretty steep for newcomers who are trying to catch up. Siege does feel like it has been set up to encourage players to spend real money on its year-long passes, which provide every new operator released in their given time period (plus some extra premium currency and other goodies) for $30. It’s akin to an annual subscription fee, but nearly everything but some premium cosmetics can be earned without spending any money beyond buying the base game.
It's disappointing that the Year-One operators haven’t dropped in price since their release.
That said, I’m disappointed that the Year-One operators haven’t dropped in price since their release. The Year-One and Year-Two passes have both left the store, and the one option to get them cheaper is a slightly discounted bundle only available for real money. I’d love to see these older operators drop to a Renown cost to make them more inviting to new players once their release hype has long passed.
The store, in general, suffers from growing pains that Siege has yet to address. A massive amount of cosmetic gun skins, gun charms, and operator outfits are available, with new ones arriving as often as weekly. Nearly all of these cosmetics can be unlocked with Renown, and some of them are extremely cool. The gun skins, in particular, tend to be varied and gorgeous, everything from being textured like gems to having detailed tigers stretching up the barrel. Many of the most recent operator outfits and headgear options have started branching into cool and creative territory beyond just different shades of camo, like Valkyrie’s Pop Art make-up or Blackbeard’s dapper top hat.
The problem, however, is that the store itself has become a big pile of stuff that’s nearly impossible to navigate. It’s hard to browse and hard to search, especially when it comes to bundles. Items will helpfully tell you if they are available in a bundle, but there’s no way to then go to that bundle directly, and the bundles tab is an ungodly long text list with a single image to explain everything that’s in it.
Siege wisely keeps the items in its store away from anything that really affects gameplay. There are a variety of gun scopes and barrel attachments that can be unlocked with Renown that do offer mid-match advantages, but they are cheap enough that this power boost never felt walled off or like it was compromising balance.
And, once again, what your gun looks like and the scope you are using can mean next to nothing if your opponent can simply outthink you. Siege has continued to double down on that focus on smart play over the years, and it’s made it a game I want to keep playing for a long time to come. Looking forward, Ubisoft has already laid out a free update plan for Siege’s third year, including eight more operators, two new maps, and the Outbreak game mode, meaning things don’t show any sign of slowing down.
The Verdict
Rainbow Six Siege’s focus on teamwork and strategy over just aiming prowess sets it apart in exciting ways, and the constant stream of new maps and operators have made it a wonderfully varied FPS. All that new content has made it harder for new players to catch up, and I wish more work had been done to address this, but smart play and good communication will still win you more games than having the newest operator. It’s got some growing pains to sort out, but the future continues to look bright for Siege.
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