Blow your house down
During the hands-off presentation of Rainbow Six Tactics at Gamescom, destruction obviously featured. Walls were breached, cover was blown up, and masonry was peppered with rounds. It looked excellent, but it was also familiar from other turn-based tactical games. Considering the focus of scenery destruction in Rainbow Six Siege, I wasn't sure how the team were actually advancing the tech beyond what we've seen in games like XCOM 2.
There was one moment in the hands-off demo in particular that had me worried it was basically a graphical nicety. Sniper Glaz fired a high-powered round through two interior walls, headshotting a terrorist on the other side. The round left visible holes in the walls, but beyond being a neat bit of set redressing, it wasn't anything that we couldn't have seen in other turn-based tactical games. When I spoke to the developers, I wanted to know if there was anything else happening that I wasn't perceiving, something about the destruction that made it distinctly Siege-inspired.
"For us it was a key feature from the very beginning," creative director Elie Benhamou tells me. "To make sure that this destruction was a creative tool to solve situations." Yes, he says, you can destroy walls and cover, but the holes you can make in walls are physical gaps you can then fire through – "so you can create line of sight."
While you might not be firing through the small hole left by Glaz's sniper round, larger holes left by shotgun blasts and grenades open up possibilities. Benhamou argues that it changes the way you perceive battles from other tactical games, "Usually when you have an enemy who is behind cover, the solution is to flank." You're looking to get a view of the target that is not blocked by whatever they're hiding behind and that movement, he says, means "you need to put yourself at risk". Rainbow Six Tactics doesn't drop that dynamic entirely – there are still benefits to flanking and it's a tactic your enemies will use against you – but embracing the destruction tech does allow new approaches.
Benhamou describes a situation where you're facing enemies who have barricaded themselves in a room and set themselves up with overwatch on the doors, windows, and obvious corridors around the space. "In our case," Benhamou says, "you can just blow a hole and shoot through [it]. It changes the notion of safety for the enemies, but also for you. In many situations you will find yourself positioning your operators in cover, using overwatch, feeling that you are safe and that your enemies will be forced to come to you, and maybe you didn't recon and they had a shotgunner, a rocketeer, or gadgets that will totally disrupt [your position]."
Naturally, to lean into the destruction tech underpinning Rainbow Six Tactics, every operator can destroy scenery in some way. Though, it's only the "centrepiece of the character" for a few of them, Benhamou explains. He points to Ash, who is armed with a CREM (M120 Compact Rifle Entry Munition Launcher) – which is basically a launcher armed with impact grenades – and Sledge carries a BOS (Big Ol' Sledgehammer), saying they can "destroy pretty much everything". Stealthy Nøkk on the other hand, who is armed with a silenced shotgun and pistol, has to work harder to make an impact. "She will blow holes in the walls," Benhamou says, "but it requires more commitment because you need to be close, you need to use your ammo."
When I wrote about Rainbow Six Tactics' reveal back in August, I think I was more effusive than some of you in the comments. And I stand by that, this turn-based take on Siege looks to join the modern versus shooter version of the series with its tactical roots in a really natural way. There's something about the way you can coordinate the actions of all these operators as a single player that sends me right back to the days of playing Rogue Spear on Saturday afternoon's in my dad's study.
And, I'll admit, before I played Dreadline Express, it was probably the thing at Gamescom I saw that had me most excited. It looks like an excellent tactical game. Though talking to Benhamou left me desperate to test this claim about unpicking the classic flanking tactics of the genre. It's a big claim and I hope it's true, because so much of Rainbow Six Tactics looks competently familiar, so if it can do all that and make me feel unsafe in my choices as I plot them, it will be a welcome change from other more recent turn-based tactical games. I've been enjoying Star Wars: Zero Company, but it's not been much of a challenge for someone who now has hundreds of hours under my belt of XCOM and its kin.
There's still no word of a release date, so, for now, I'll have to keep eyeing up Rainbow Six Tactics and its big claims from afar.
Travel and accommodation to Gamescom was provided by the conference organisers.
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