While mobile game expectations have only been growing from year to year, it still feels like flipping a coin whenever a major console/PC franchise finally makes the jump to phones. Will it be a great on-the-go representation of a console/PC game we love, or will it be a money-grubbing cash-in? The only way to know for sure is to actually play it.
With that in mind, I was happy to finally get to jump in to the latest closed beta for Rainbow Six Mobile, and even happier to discover that Ubisoft seems to have done a very good job of understanding what players love about Rainbow Six Siege and how to make those things work on mobile. Like Siege, Rainbow Six Mobile is a deeply tactical, teamplay-focused multiplayer first-person shooter. The game focuses on realism, which means firefights are intense, deadly, and over in the blink of an eye. Don’t expect an arcade shooter experience where your character can take a whole clip of bullets to the chest and survive; any extended fire in your direction is going to knock you out quickly.
Because of that reality, Rainbow Six Mobile requires playing smartly, which means using a huge variety of strategic options. I was able to breach doors and windows with explosives, rappel up the side of buildings, use remote control drones to help locate enemies, and even shoot right through many walls in the game. When on the defending side for certain game modes, I also had to put up barriers and traps to prep for the incoming enemies.
I’m honestly shocked at how Ubisoft has successfully carried over virtually every mechanic that makes Rainbow Six Siege such an incredible, deep experience. In a purely mechanical sense, this makes Rainbow Six Mobile significantly more complicated than the average mobile shooter. In addition to aiming, shooting, and tossing out grenades, the lower right side of the screen has a bunch of different buttons representing the many options at your disposal at any given moment. For my own part, I found the touch controls still perfectly usable, but if I were to stick with it long-term, I’d probably want to switch to a controller, which the game already supports.
My only other concern with Rainbow Six Mobile so far is its light gacha elements. These aren’t entirely new—Siege also has packs that players earn and open for random rewards—but it seems baked in as an even more crucial system to this game, with players needing to crack open packs and earn tickets to unlock new characters, or to even earn experience points with characters they’ve already unlocked. With characters now split into rarities, it feels like it could take a long time to gain access to, much less level up, a lot of the best operators in the game. Compare that to Siege, where you may need to grind a long time to earn the currency to unlock characters for free, but at least you can choose who you want to unlock or just grab some premium currency and unlock whoever you want right away.
It’s still too early in Rainbow Six Mobile’s beta life to tell how unbalanced this gacha system will make things. Will leveling up an operator and unlocking all of their various gear and ability modifiers make them significantly more powerful than a level one version of that character? It’s hard to say. But one thing is for sure: an S-tier attack operator like Hibana is always going to be better than using the generic “Attack Recruit” that I was stuck with when I ran out of tickets.
I’ll have to wait and see how those concerns shape up as Ubisoft continues updating the beta and heads toward launch for Rainbow Six Mobile, but even with those worries, I remain really impressed by what they’ve accomplished here so far. If you’ve been dying for a way to keep your tactical shooter games going even when you’re away from a computer or TV, this mobile port has really delivered.
If you’d like to try out the closed beta for Rainbow Six Mobile for yourself, check out this guide for how to download Rainbow Six Mobile beta and play now.
Area f2 gotta be the first one to do it closer to the original game in mobile, but shame they copyright it It the first rip-off game almost everyone enjoyed
2023-06-17