Rainbow Six Extraction: Tips and Tricks to Be a Better Player

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction is a rather difficult game. It’s not the type of zombie or alien shooter where you fight hordes of progressively harder enemies and can be mostly unscathed. This game takes the nature of a much more tactical and methodical approach to an infected game mode and turns the realism up to 11. For those who are learning the ropes, follow this guide and learn some tips and tricks so you can be a better player in Rainbow Six Extraction.

Tips and Tricks to be a better player in Rainbow Six Extraction

Don’t stick to one character/Operator

This game rewards the player in the long run for leveling multiple characters. It’ll punish you if you specialize a bit too much to the tee. As an example, if you find yourself hitting 0 HP in a mission, you’ll lose the Operator you were playing as in that mission. Basically, if your only Operator that has any playtime and levels went MIA, you’ll have to start playing as someone else until you successfully recover them and have them gain their health back upon recovery.

Prepare for your missions accordingly

Make sure to pick the difficulty that you and your teammates (if you have any) agree with. Then as your mission loads up, plan your gadgets and the Operator that best suits the three-part incursion. If there are objectives that would benefit your team from being more stealthy like a takedown, don’t go in with weapons without a silencer or characters who create a lot of noise like Fuze.

Pick your battles

Since this game is a lot more strategic, you ideally would be fighting battles that you need to fight. You only have so much ammunition and gadgets. While it is somewhat viable to brute force your way to clear all Archaeans in an area, it isn’t all too necessary. Objective XP is plentiful, and a team that is intact in the end will be rewarded accordingly.

Have a plan

Everyone on the team has to be on the same page as you. Know what roles you’ll assume and act on them. Don’t be the only one playing the OBJ while everyone else is either looking for pickups or playing zombie cleanup. There is strength in numbers, but there is even greater strength in doing what you’re determined to do.

Intel is key

Knowing the enemy’s location and their movements before engagement can prevent unnecessary hardships on the team. The game by default equips you with an RC drone that is undetected by the Archaeans. Use it to your advantage and scan out anything like nests, mines, and roaming enemies. While you’re at it, you can scan the area and map out what would be the optimal direction in which you engage the enemies at. Better yet, if you’re low on health and trying to extract, you can use that as a means of methodically picking out the opposition or avoiding them entirely.

Make use of your environment

Piggybacking off the previous tip, should you find yourself having to engage with the potentially scanned targets ahead, you can use the environment to your advantage. Lots of the environment in this game can be destroyed. You can essentially shoot through a wall and take out targets of interest through walls. If they become aware of your presence, you can reinforce the walls you shot through, making it harder for them to break through and overwhelm you.

You can also use the interactable doors to make Archaeans swarm up or funnel themselves in from another entrance. It’ll increase your chances of making it out mostly unscathed.

Look out for supplies

Sometimes you won’t have enough ammo, React tech, or ability power to complete an objective. Rainbow Six Extraction really pushes you to be very aware of the loadout you have. The last thing you want to do is head into an enemy stronghold on your last mag or worse, use up an already depleted ability.

You can find resupply crates that replenish ammo, health, gadgets, or your ability. These are scarce and can mostly be reliably found when going further into the next area of an incursion, so be on the lookout!

Callouts, callouts, callouts

In a cooperative setting, you don’t want to all shoot the same enemy or objective. Perhaps you’re in the heat of battle and don’t notice an exploder is approaching you from the back. Just like public transportation rules, “if you see something, say something”.

Good team communication really goes a long way, especially when you start fighting tougher mutations and higher-tiered Archaeans like the Proteans and Apexes.

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction is out now for PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series S/X, and PC. A 2-hour trial is available for people who don’t own the full game.