Rainbow Six Siege X First Hands-On Preview: The New Dual Front Mode Reinvigorates the 10-Year-Old FPS

When I was in high school, I would stay up ‘til all kinds of ungodly hours of the night playing PC games. I even stayed up five days straight once, just to get to the end of Baldur’s Gate II ‘Throne of Bhaal,’ but what fascinated me about PC games most was how inventive they could be.

One that struck my imagination powerfully was Red Faction, which caught my eye because it had some of the hallmarks of DOOM (a high-tech, first-person shooter set on Mars, you say?) yet it added an essential wrinkle; terrain deformation. Red Faction is set in the mines of Mars, and I could fire explosive weapons at walls, creating holes or destroying them, and even tunneling through rock to circumvent checkpoints. It was all about charting your own course and finding your own path to accomplish your goals. It was incredible.

Unfortunately, not a lot has been done with that idea in the intervening years, but when Rainbow Six Siege came out, the ability to freely climb and rappel up and down buildings, and shoot through or destroy walls and ceilings sent a delightful little tickle through my Red Faction-loving brain.

While Siege began as a far more focused (and less exploratory) affair than the old Volition shooter, that (and quite a bit more) is about to change with the arrival of the upcoming Siege X update. Apart from gameplay, graphical, auditory, and UI enhancements, it introduces what is shaping up to be a fantastic new permanent multiplayer mode: Dual Front.

In Dual Front, a predetermined seasonal Operator pool will dictate who you can play, and team sizes are bumped up to six per side. Instead of spawning directly inside (or outside) one target area, there are three large areas to choose from, each with its own objective, so your team of six will need to split up to focus on both defending and attacking different locations simultaneously.

While the scope has expanded, much of the great core gameplay remains the same. When a match starts, each team will spawn in their squad HQ and one of two locations in your team’s sector will start a countdown to a Defend mission. The is true for your opponents, so each team will need to defend one spot while attacking another. How you handle that, and where you decide to go, is up to you.

What’s more, there is a neutral zone in between the mirrored zones held by each team, and extra objectives will appear there. Completing those objectives, such as rescuing a hostage and getting them to an extraction point, will give your team a big boost in the back-and-forth struggle for supremacy, so even if you fail to defend your first location or attack the enemy base, victory is still possible.

Since Dual Front expands the contested space so significantly, I was moving between attacking and defending to suit the team's needs, creating a more free flowing experience with way more variation between matches than your standard Siege match. What results is a fluid, chaotic mess I had a blast with.

The seasonal Operator pools will be updated every month, and because your squad will need to do a little bit of everything, you’ll have access to both Attacker and Defender Operators on the character select screen. When you die during a match, you’ll quickly respawn and re-select your Operator, so changing strategies on the fly to counter your enemies is a central (and delightfully fun) part of the game now.

Several times during my preview, it looked like my current (attacking) team was in a great spot, so I would rush across the map to help my other beleaguered comrades who were fighting for their lives to defend our own base objective. Sometimes, everything was as it seemed: I arrived in time, and our team brought home a victory. Other times, I got separated from my team only for them to be ambushed by reinforcements. Each match was tense, because in maps as large as Dual Front’s, it’s difficult to know where the enemy is until they become a capital “p” Problem.

Speaking of navigating larger areas, I should mention some of the new gameplay additions. You can now rappel around corners of buildings and even sprint while rappelling, so it’s easier to poke around and find ways to get inside structures. New fire extinguishers create concussive blasts and visual obfuscation when destroyed, gas pipes can be shot or damaged to create jets of fire before exploding and scattering fire around on the ground, and metal detectors can be disabled temporarily or permanently. Overall, it’s more fun to play in the space, and there is a lot more space to play in on Dual Front’s mirrored map.

Siege X also marks a shift in monetization. After the update, Siege will adopt a free-to-play model, and for casual versus competitive stuff, here’s the skinny: casual and onboarding playlists, unranked quickplay, and Dual Front are all free, and will grant access to up to 26 Operators and skins. Siege Cup and Ranked modes will be pay-to-unlock, and grant access to all 50 Operators. So if you are jumping in as a casual player, there are no barriers to entry, but new players who want to get more serious on the competitive side will need to fork over some cash. If you already have Siege, don’t worry; you will keep everything you have, and retain access to all modes (and as an added bonus, Siege players will get a badge showing off the year they started and a little bonus for each year of Siege they played).

Some other updates in the Siege X package include five modernized maps (Clubhouse, Chalet, Bank, Kafe, and Border), enhanced visuals, audio, first-person shadows, new menus, better player onboarding, the ability to inspect weapons, and a lot more. The dev team has also committed to introduce a new Operator (or remastering an existing one) each season, and a bunch more.

But all those enhancements pale in comparison to Dual Front, which is on track to become my favorite mode for Siege, and once Siege X launches, it’s likely to be the only mode I’ll play as Siege marks its upcoming tenth birthday in an incredibly fun way.