For now, don't treat this as a full review. It’s more of a first impression kinda thing. It was impossible to find a pick-up group during the early access period when we had access to it. Although you can play alone, to get the proper experience, all three members of the review team had to be online at the same time. Given that our schedules weren’t always in sync, we weren’t able to plow through the content as much as we’d have liked.
That said, even if you do manage to find a PUG, it probably won’t be an ideal experience. Extraction puts the same emphasis on cooperation and teamwork as Siege does - just to a less competitive extent. So unless you’re on point with communication - and there is a ping system if you’re not on mics, missions are going to get pretty challenging.
Difficulty
When my friends and I started playing, we felt pretty underwhelmed at the start. After the first mission, we felt like just running through the game guns blazing was enough to get us through. Fortunately, the game was all “okay, that was just an appetizer, boys” because, in the very next mission, we felt like the difficulty ramped up considerably - to the point where we got whooped so badly that we were pretty much forced to start playing it the way we were supposed to.
For every failed mission, or if you get knocked down twice and your teammates were unable to extract you, you lose an Operator. What that means is you won’t be able to use that particular Operator on your next deployments, and that you’ll need to mount rescue missions to get them back. If you fail to do so a number of times, you still get your operator back but they lose 30% of their total XP. At low levels, it won’t suck too much, but if you’ve grinded a specific operator for hours and hours, losing that 30% is going to hurt. This gives running your missions, and especially your rescue missions, a very real sense of stakes.
You can run all of the missions on every map, as far as I know, up to 4 levels of difficulty - moderate, cautious, severe, and critical, which is reserved for high-level Operators and players who know what they’re doing. Every step up in difficulty gives you more variations in enemy type and higher XP gains.
Operators
You start out with just 9 operators, with 9 more to unlock. Each Operator has a special skill - and much like other character-based shooters, skills can be classified offensive, defensive, or utility. Personal favorites include Alibi for her decoy that draws agro and Finka for her adrenaline surge that automatically rezzes teammates even from far away. These abilities come in clutch sometimes.
Each Operator also has their own set of weapons and attachments.
As each Operator levels up, you get enhanced versions of your skills or more weapons, weapon skins, uniforms, and attachments.
A bunch of the cosmetics is grindable, but there are a few that are for sale for real money. From what I see though, the grindable ones look the best in my opinion.₱
Milestones
As you complete missions and objectives, you gain character XP, which unlocks milestones. Milestones determine your overall progression. With each new milestone, you can unlock Operators, new gadgets, and new maps.
Gameplay
Because of its pedigree, you’d be right to expect it to have extremely pinpoint tight gunplay and for the most part, you’d be right. Once you break stealth, given the frantic, almost-horde mode-like behavior of enemy NPCs, you’d almost have to rely on getting as many rounds into your targets as possible to try to keep your team from getting overwhelmed.
If you can manage it, and if the particular mission objective will allow for it, it’s almost always better to stay out of sight - I guess a lot like Rainbow Six Siege. A lot of the Operators have suppressed weapons that won’t alert other Archaeans in the immediate area. You also have the ability to crouch down and walk slower to keep from making as much noise as possible. And failing all that, in the early levels, I find that a well-timed smoke grenade is pretty much a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Mission Structure
Like I mentioned, I have only really experienced early-level gameplay, so there are likely missions that I haven’t touched. However, so far, with the ones I did get to play, there’s already a good mix of objectives to keep you and your teammates on your toes. There are pretty typical objectives like “king of the hill” where you have to remain in an area while you defend it, silent assassination, elite hunting, and asset retrieval just to name a few. Each objective poses its own challenges so you have to switch up your strategies from objective to objective. Over time, though, you start to encounter the same missions again and again. That's why I think a game like this is probably best enjoyed in bite-sized chunks with a few buddies - the social bit is where I drew the most enjoyment.
Should you buy it?
If you have at least two friends who want to share a high-intensity, high-tension cooperative experience that has the tight gunplay of R6 Siege with you, then you should definitely consider it. If you can find some kind of guild or Discord with active players, even better. The base game only costs ₱1,500 on both the Epic Game Store (use code B1M please!) and Uplay! It's half the price of a full game these days, so that might be enough to convince you. Just remember that it's best enjoyed in small doses because the mission structures do get a little repetitive over time.
If you want to play alone, yeah, it’s doable, but you lose a lot of the magic. Alone, it’s nothing special. Jumping into PUGs might be interesting but you lose a lot of the social teamwork aspect that made my experience with Rainbow Six Extraction very fun.
7.5Score