Have You Played... Rainbow Six Siege?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

I mourned for Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege. The multiplayer first-person shooter launched amid stories of low sales and low player counts, but it was so, so good. Thank goodness the audience found it eventually.

Siege's great trick is that its buildings are destructible. Not in that Battlefield, 'it'll fall down eventually' way. But in the granular way of a John Woo movie; bullets rip holes in walls, doors, ceilings, almost any surface, discouraging camping and creating new angles of attack.

This makes your tactical maneuvers extremely tense. You'll hear footsteps on the floor above you in some American house and know two things: one, locate that enemy and you can shoot them from below, straight through the floor; two, that another enemy might already be peeking at you through some unseen gap in the world's geometry, about to take you out. So you'll creep everywhere, work together as a team, and use each class's particular gadgetry to protect yourself and hunt your enemies.

Siege isn't a throwback to the beloved days of Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear or even Rainbow Six Vegas, but it is a smart, modern, multiplayer game which captures some of the same great feelings.