4Chan and Reddit leaks where someone with suspicious insider information writes down a bunch of details, some of which turn out to be true has become the new norm - we get those every other day, it seems. However, real juice is still fairly rare - though more and more common, as evidenced by the recent Redfall playtest leak. Rainbow Six Extraction, the co-op not-zombie, zombie shooter based on a popular Rainbow Six Siege temporary game mode and famously renamed from Quarantine, was first revealed a good long while ago with little additional information for quite some time. More recently, however, we’ve seen leaks and an official gameplay reveal trailer. The game isn’t set to launch until January 2022 - barring any delays which are ever so common nowadays - so it’s pretty surprising to see the entire opening cinematic leak. The video has been making the rounds online with uploads being hunted by Ubisoft, but at the time of writing this Streamable link still had the goods. What we see in the cinematic is pretty cookie cutter as far as these disaster stories go. A few scenes of idyllic, normal, pre-horribly messed up leisure activities around the Statue of Liberty. An old man is purchasing a snow-globe on which the camera lingers just long enough for you to know that it will get symbolically smashed when the trouble starts. The whole time, one of the characters is providing a voiceover. Then the inevitable apocalypse strikes, and freaky glistening black spikes start growing out of the ground, accompanied by tendrils and a strange red mist. The spikes and tendrils devastate the island, rip off lady liberty’s head in a way worthy of a Mortal Kombat fatality and then the snow-globe is smashed. At this point the scene switches to a pair of military choppers with Ash, the narrator, on board heading towards as REACT ship off the shore of NYC. Flying over the ruins of the statue, we see that way more spikes and tendrils have grown since, and Ash refers to it as a parasite. On board the REACT ship, we see a few generic scenes of scientists doing scientist things before heading into a large control room with awfully impractical holographic displays arranged stylishly around a large logo emblazoned on the ground - and our suspension of disbelief is broken. Huge freaky alien spikes? Sure, but no actual crisis-management agency would bother with interior design. Here Ash meets with some other operators, and ends the narration by saying they should all get to work - ironic, seeing as they’ve already been working and she just got here. Typical manager. All in all, the leaked cinematic doesn’t actually reveal much about the game we didn’t already know, and none of the footage has any gameplay. We got a better look at REACT’s yellow equipment which we’ll likely be staring at a lot when Extraction is actually released. A couple of the characters seen in the latter part of the cinematic are probably playable operators, but we hardly see the full roster in such a short video. As the release of Rainbow Six Extractions draws near, we expect more information about the story and gameplay to be revealed by Ubisoft - if not, it sure will get leaked considering how much info about this game keeps getting out ahead of time. Rainbow Six Extraction will launch in January 2022.
