During Gamescom Opening Night Live, Ubisoft announced the next game in the long-running Tom Clancy series: Rainbow 6 Tactics. The announcement trailer showcased how the turn-based tactics game will play–it looks pretty much like Rainbow Six Siege and XCOM: Chimera Squad had a baby.
And it’s entirely single-player, which is great! I love playing Siege, but after years away, I simply cannot enjoy it anymore. The game has too many operators to keep track of (any hero shooter with 50+ characters is too much) and the skill ceiling to enjoy the game is so high–I’ve simply fallen behind and every month away makes it harder to try and jump back in. Rainbow 6 Tactics looks appealing because it lets me get back into Siege (kinda) without having to worry about other online players.
And the game looks very cool, likely because it’s being helmed by Ubisoft Paris, a studio that helped create Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope, which was super excellent for taking the formula for turn-based tactics games and evolving it. In Sparks of Hope’s case, it was rewarding the strategy of purposeful movement. Rainbow 6 Tactics seems to also be building on the turn-based-tactics game formula, but instead focusing hard on how a battle starts.
Like Siege, Rainbow 6 Tactics’ missions are split into phases. In the initial phase, you use drones to uncover enemy positions, hostage locations, defensive armaments, and more. When that’s done, you use whatever information you have to strategize during the breach planning phase, positioning your chosen operators at specific entry points and dictating how they’ll get inside–burst through a window, knock down a wall, shoot a target from distance, etc. When you execute, all of your operators then act simultaneously.
From there, the rest of the mission proceeds as most turn-based-tactics games do, with each side taking their turn in combat, trying to land shots depending on a percentage chance to hit, and using cover and special abilities to turn the tide of battle. And you direct one operator at a time, like other games. The one big difference to it seems to take inspiration from Siege: breakable environments.
And, of course, that first part of every mission looks very different from most other turn-based tactics games. That system of set-up and breach phases really intrigues me. The game seems to be putting a huge onus on trying to set yourself up for success as much as possible on turn one with a perfectly executed and synchronized assault, potentially putting yourself into a tricky scenario if you don’t do your due diligence. So many tactics games see you reacting to an enemy already aware of you, so I’m interested to see how a game in the genre works where you essentially have a turn before a mission even begins.
In the game, you play as Paul Bishop, aka Six (a familiar face for those who played Rainbow Six: Vegas 2). You have 15 of Siege’s operators under your command and you’re trying to rebuild Team Rainbow while still responding to terrorist threats. In a pre-brief for the trailer announcement, we saw Ash, Zofia, Nøkk, Glaz, Doc, Montagne, Sledge, Finka, and Twitch–community developer Emilie Cerkiewicz says that the chosen operators are among the most “iconic” of Siege and that players will see fan-favorites, so I assume the likes of Smoke, Hibana, and Dokkaebi will be there too.
Rainbow 6 Tactics’ story will have dozens of handcrafted maps and take place between the events of Siege Year 10 and Year 11 (the current season). This probably means that Year 11 operators Solid Snake and Noor aren’t in the game.
Rainbow 6 Tactics is set to launch in 2027 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. The game will have no in-game store (like, at all) or in-game monetization systems, and won’t be a live-service title–all of which feels impossible for a new Ubisoft game, but that’s what Cerkiewicz said during the pre-brief, so who am I to doubt?
