What do Mario and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six have in common? Both game franchises now feature turn-based tactical squad shooters developed by Ubisoft Paris. With the Gamescom reveal of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Tactics, Ubisoft are pushing past surface-level comparisons of Mario + Rabbids to Firaxis’ outstanding XCOM games with something more wholesale in its gameplay likeness.
The announcement trailer showed off a minute and a half of gameplay for the upcoming turn-based top-down tactical shooter. In this spin-off of the Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege sub-franchise coming to PS5, Xbox Series S|X, and PC, players form squads of four from a roster of 15 operators hailing from the multiplayer tactical first-person shooter. Most amusing of all, the player assumes the role of Six – a no-nonsense commander featured in the trailer who will manage operations both at the headquarters and in the field. I’m personally looking forward to Ubisoft giving us a R6 game where we assume the role of Rainbow, presumably Six’s far happier and open-minded counterpart.
Tactics looks every bit the top-down abstraction of the Siege formula. From the recognisable faces and their associated arsenals, to the visual language and mission design, everything is very Siege (albeit from the bird’s-eye view). When players aren’t managing operator skill trees and R&D back at base, the in-field scenarios follow operations borrowed from Siege.
Players will be conducting hostage rescues and bomb disposals, where they co-ordinate the squad in a turn-based fashion. Infiltrate a location, scope out the combatants, and then position the team at various obvious and improvised breach points to close in on the objective. Use Ash to blow out a wall from a distance with Gaz ready to line up multiple headshots, while Sledge breaks down a door with his hammer and breaches into a room behind Montagne’s bulletproof shield. Tactics looks to replicate the pulse-pounding, on-the-fly planning of Siege, but with the calm consideration of a thoughtful turn-based structure.
Rainbow Six Siege now boasts a roster of over 70 highly unique operators, giving Tactics some very exciting runway for future operator expansion. During the trailer, we see just over half of the characters that make the cut. Most are OG classics, with Doc, Finka, and Twitch also revealed as options for your optimal team composition. We also see Zofia, added in Siege’s second year, and Nokk from its fourth. Personally, I hope we get to see Fuze make an appearance before he teamkills his entire squad by pumping grenades into a room mid-breach.
Whereas Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope served up many cursory and obvious comparisons to the modern XCOM games, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Tactics looks to take the gameplay and presentation parallels even further. The trailer shows mechanics such as line of sight, cover, early-mission stealth reconnaissance, overwatch surprise attacks, and chance-to-hit percentages. Enemy eliminations also feature those same exhilarating cinematic camera close-ups that come with successfully unloading a round of slugs to an alien’s face. Paired with destructible environments, a focus on responding to international incidents, squad development and base management, giving Mario a gun seems to have been a precursor to Rainbow Six’s natural and inevitable foray into the arena of turn-based shooter XCOM-likes. And hey, this seems a much better evolution of the Siege brand than the just-alright alien-shooting shenanigans of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction.
What operators are you hoping to see fill out the launch roster for Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Tactics? Share your thoughts with us in the comments.
