“When you suggested getting revenge on Vice President Thompson, I thought you meant we were going to storm his house. But instead, let’s prove Ubisoft’s new destructible environments engine with this C4.”
Ubisoft
You’d be forgiven for shrugging off the asymmetrical team-shooting Rainbow Six: Siege. After all, the game’s multiplayer mode, which saw its live gameplay debut behind closed doors at this year’s E3, looks pretty familiar. Two squads of equally reinforced soldiers take turns as special forces or criminals, facing each other in tight corridors as they fire military weapons and die very, very quickly. Why it took the designers from Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy department so long to follow Counterattackfootsteps?
While the premise seems superfluous, Ubisoft’s E3 demo proved that the mode can still bring something new to the team multiplayer landscape, especially thanks to its advanced destruction modeling and unique gameplay. Rainbow Six hits. I played a few rounds of the game’s five-on-five multiplayer, either breaking into a house in the suburbs and rescuing a hostage, or nestling in that house and fighting off the incoming attack.
Go-go gadget camera bot!
the start of each round R6:S includes approximately 30 seconds of pre-battle preparations. Instead of pecking CounterattackIn the in-game shops, players choose ready-made gear, some with body armor, others with more gadget options, so they can get started right away.
The defending team votes on a starting point where the hostage will hide, then burns through their assigned defensive items, which in our demo included barbed wire, window barricades, and door reinforcements. Barbed wire slows down footsteps for anyone walking through, while barricades provide temporary stopgap options for the attacking team (more on that later).
The offensive team, on the other hand, spends their 30 seconds before the game piloting wireless, camera-mounted robots through and through the house (which cannot be seen or destroyed by defenders). Teammates split up and talk to find out which parts of the house are being fortified, while trying to find the hostage’s hidden location. If an attacker’s robot finds the hostage, all players will see a warning.
Once the three-minute timer goes off, both sides begin their moves, and it wasn’t long before the game’s destructible environments played a big role in our strategy. For a long time, Rainbow Six games have allowed players to stealthily break into fortified terrorist outposts, and this game carried that torch with elements like rappelling down walls and smashing windows. This, however R6 offering is the first in which players can blow apart most walls and surfaces with explosives or even guns.
Some steel-reinforced doors cannot be destroyed by C4, but blasts on the floor and ceiling make up for that. Surprisingly, during our test session, the defenders benefited more from destruction by shooting small holes through barricaded doors and windows. This allowed the defenders to keep attackers far away, but still see if they reached a certain corridor. Towards the end of each round, both sides began recklessly firing bullets through paper-thin walls to provoke the occasional surprise kill.
Fools rushed in
As much fun as destructible environments are on a grand scale Battlefield battles, the tighter environment and time-limited rounds of R6:S seems like a more interesting case study for the impact of destruction on shooting strategy. In particular, fools rushing in can expect to be blown to smithereens by hidden bullets through walls if they’re lured into a trap, forcing players to make the most of pre-match preparation.
I found myself not using rappelling much in the demo, mainly because windows were usually reinforced by our enemies; the session’s single map offered much safer routes on foot, either blowing apart the front door or making it through the basement gym. At one point I managed to get a group of enemies through a garage in a row, but the explosive I laid down had an annoying one-Mississippi trigger time, meaning I got shot before I could enjoy my source. laid plan.
Finally, there’s the game’s so-called “live hostage,” who was advertised as a realistic, terrified character. In a Rock Paper Shotgun report, a member of the design team explained the woman’s motive as the game’s hostage, saying “we wanted people to want to protect her” — as if enough games don’t reinforce that trope — then clarified that the finale game will also feature male hostages. Anyway, all the hostage did in the demo was screech at random intervals, even when no imminent danger could be seen or heard, and I couldn’t shake the hostage through the level to respond to a successful hit, for example. attack.
The most exciting things came thanks to doors, floors, and other objects that could be blown apart, making the game’s assault weapons – machine guns, shotguns, sniper rifles – feel a bit more powerful than average. Otherwise, I got bored pretty quickly with the suburban house as a siege point, especially the obvious paths, and I hope the retail game will enjoy a wider and much more vertically oriented set of strongholds. Such an array would help dispel the feeling that R6:S is just a long awaited one Counterattack mod. We’ll have to wait for the game to launch in 2015 on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PCs to find out.