Rainbow Six Siege is punishingly difficult and lacks offline modes

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege is out now and is one of the hardest FPS games in the market. Not to mention it persuades people to be online most of the time. Rainbow Six Siege feels more like a step backwards from the previous games in the series. The two Rainbow Six Vegas games were excellent offering slick controls, many customisation options and a great single player campaign. The setting of Las Vegas also made the game look beautiful.  Siege is the exact opposite of the Vegas games and feels like a stripped down and old-school affair. It almost feels like what 2K does with the WWE video games. Ubisoft has removed lots of popular features from the older games and will probably bring them back in future titles to advertise them as being "new".  First of all, the controls in Siege are old-school all the way. There's no cover system that was present in the Vegas games and your character feels stiff and rigid whenever they move. The character doesn't feel agile or fast like in other FPS games such as Halo 5: Guardians and Call of Duty: Black Ops 3.  The only way the controls feel a bit more modern are the many gadgets that you can use. Your character can rappel off high buildings and breach fortified walls. You can even use a drone to scout out enemy locations and a scanner that helps you locate bombs in the vicinity. However, the actual shooting mechanics feels stiff and sometimes the enemies are bullet sponges.  The biggest thing that will scare away casual gamers is that Rainbow Six Siege is catered towards expert FPS players. This is because you only have one life and there are no respawns or checkpoints. If you want to complete any missions, you have to be accurate and fast enough to dodge enemy fire.  The fact that there are no respawns makes the online multiplayer uneventful for unskilled players. If you die quickly, all you have to do is sit there and watch until the round has ended. You can "help" by watching through the surveillance cameras to locate enemy players, but that's about it.  Even in missions where you shoot the A.I like the "Situations" and "Terrorist Hunt" modes, you have to do it all in one go. There are no checkpoints or extra health for you to pick up along the way. When you die, you have to start a mission all over again. As i said before, the game has a high difficulty curve and it's punishing to play.  The other annoying thing about Siege is the lack of offline modes. Only the Situations mode is available to play offline. This is not a single player campaign as it's more like a glorified tutorial mode to get you ready to play against real-life players online. It feels cheap and rushed after the epic single player campaigns that were in the Vegas games.  Worst of all, you have to be connected to the Siege servers even if you want to level up. If the servers are down (they're down constantly on Xbox One), you cannot level up. Another absurd thing is that you also need to be online to play the Terrorist Hunt mode by yourself too. Siege is a bit like Star Wars Battlefront in a lot of ways. There are minimal single player modes because the game forces you to play online. It also feels like it's lacking in content too as there are only a few maps available at launch . The maps are ordinary looking to say the least as this game's graphics are nothing to brag about. It looks like an Xbox 360 game at best.  Overall, Rainbow Six Siege is a stripped down and disappointing offering in the long running series. It feels more like an HD remaster from an older game rather than an actual new title. The graphics are old-school looking much like the gameplay is. It's too bad Ubisoft cancelled Rainbow Six Patriots as that game looked better.  Verdict: 6.0/10