// PC GAMER — GAMING
Okay, I wasn't expecting 'Rainbow Six XCOM' to be one of my favourite Gamescom demos
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Hard experience has taught me that I am not, in my heart, a Rainbow Six Siege guy. In fact, I'm not really a Rainbow Six guy. The series' hardcore-ish squad-based first-person gameplay just never jibed with me going all the way back to 1998, when a five-year-old Josh got shot to death by eco-terrorists in about 0.3 seconds and promptly decided to play something else.
So colour me surprised that my brief, hands-off Gamescom demo with Rainbow Six Tactics not only blew my hair back, it quickly became one of my most-anticipated games of the show, and precisely because of the ways it blends together familiar XCOM-ish tactics gameplay with, well, a whole buncha Siege stuff.
Here's the pitch: a bunch of characters you last saw executing people in Siege have signed up for a new Rainbow organisation, under the command of Paul Bishop from Rainbow Six Vegas. Bishop is a bipedal breeze block who you, notionally, play as, but you only 'play' him in the way you play the commander in XCOM, from what I've seen. For the most part, you're either touching up Rainbow's base or giving orders in the field.
'In the field' was where we found ourselves at the demo's start. The Rainbow gang have infiltrated an industrial dock. Their aim is to make their way across it and into a warehouse at the other side.
This bit? All very XCOM (or, indeed, Mario + Rabbids, which several R6 Tactics devs worked on). You're moving your fellas about a field, setting up overwatch zones, and using their special abilities to take down foes. For instance, one of the characters in our demo squad was Montagne, who more-or-less functioned as a piece of moveable cover—the semi-circle area from which he could painlessly take attacks marked on the ground around his feet.
Also on our roster: Siege's sniper Glaz, who in Tactics can shoot in a great long line that can take out multiple enemies, if you rack 'em up. The game has no fog of war in its outside areas, making the guy with a gun that shoots really far something of a force of nature.
So far, so much a perfectly cromulent Rainbow-Six-flavoured take on XCOM-style tactics, but it's when the gang got to the warehouse that R6 Tactics began to show its hand. Our demoer did not just pile up her troops around the building's entryways and go—which is what I've done for years in all games remotely like this.
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Instead, it all got very Siege. First up, the team deployed drones—the same little wheeled drones you've deployed in countless Siege matches as the attacker—to scope out the warehouse interior and pinpoint enemies. Unlike the outside world, interior spaces very much do have fog of war, and properly reconnoitering them looks, well, pretty important. It's a neat wrinkle in a familiar loop, and turns XCOM-style scouting (the process by which you send one fast trooper dashing off to see what's up before having them dash back) into a more fleshed-out phase of the operation.