The tension before you breach a room in Rainbow Six Siege is often palpable. I’ll place a charge on one door while our sniper Glaz watches the windows from outside, and then wait for our teammate playing Dokkaebi to distract the enemies with a phone call before blowing it wide open. Coordination is key, and working together to get the most out of each our Operators’ abilities can be even more valuable as landing a good headshot – though the headshots definitely help.

Siege has come a long way since it launched two years ago. A steady stream of new maps, operators, and cosmetic items - along with a heaping helping of bug fixes, balance changes, and stability improvements - have slowly transformed it into a much deeper competitive game, even if there are some growing pains that come along with that. Siege has always been a fun and challenging FPS, but as it enters its third year it has gained a pull that’s become hard to resist.

The core of Siege hasn’t changed; a 5v5 dance of attack and defense between well-equipped military special forces squads on compact but complex maps. A wonderful emphasis on strategy and smart play over pure twitch aiming gives it a distinct feel that you don’t get from games like Call of Duty or Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Often times figuring out which door to barricade and which to break open can win you more games than just being able to outgun your opponents.

Learning which door to barricade can win you more games than just outgunning your opponent.

Each round of a match starts with a frantic race as one side sets up their defenses and the other hunts for intel with remote-controlled drones. It’s game of cat and mouse that often devolves into hilarious, Benny Hilly-style chases as the defenders try to deny the attackers of as much information as possible. It’s only a minute long, but there are a lot of subtle nuances in what walls to reinforce and where to place your traps that can differentiate the good players from the great.

Most of its levels are set in buildings with two to three stories, giving its gunfights a sense of height that many shooters lack. They’re also littered with destructible walls and floors, letting you create your own paths with breaching charges or even break small holes in defending walls to create new lines of sight. It makes Siege an immediately more accessible game, empowering you with the ability to improve your win rate through learning the maps alone, even if your aim doesn’t get any better.

There are currently a bunch of maps in the casual matchmaking queue, only nine of which are in ranked, each visually distinct and set in different locations across the globe, which results in a fantastic amount of variety every time I sit down to play. I love that I often won’t see the same map twice in an evening of games, but the flipside is that it takes longer to actually learn the layouts of those maps. Still, it’s a tradeoff that ultimately improves Siege.

Working with your teammates, either through voice chat (Suprisingly alright), text, or just map markers and pings is a simple but extremely impactful thing you can do to get better at Siege. It can be a big ask to rely on the voices of internet strangers (and Siege definitely has its fair share of utoxic players) but overall I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how this community understands and embraces good communication as a tool.

A great example of how communication can win games is with security cameras and drones. You can use cameras to mark the location of enemies for your whole team, but doing so will also warn the marked player that they’ve been seen, often resulting in them quickly hunting down and destroying that camera. But if you don’t mark enemies, and instead talk to your teammates and tell them where that person is, you can give them the same information without alerting your opponent. You can still use those same cameras after you’ve died too, which cleverly cuts out a lot of down-time as you continue to help any surviving teammates.

Siege has just three PvP game modes, all of which revolve around one team protecting a room (or two rooms, in the case of the Bomb mode) and the other team trying to break through their defenses. They are different enough in subtle ways that influence what walls you want to reinforce or which operators you should use - for example, bringing the blind grenade-spraying Fuze into a Hostage situation is asking for trouble - but the general approach either team takes in a given mode can feel a little too similar.

As a side activity to the competitive battles there’s the PvE Terrorist Hunt mode and the single-player Situations. Both of these modes are great, and I often find myself warming up for PvP by taking on the AI first. The Situations are runs through the same multiplayer maps against AI, and can feel as compelling as a fully built-out single-player mission at times, which makes it a bit disappointing that we haven’t seen any new ones as everything else grows around it.

Another way Siege has grown is its ever-expanding cast of Operators. Sixteen new characters have been added so far, which makes a current total of 36 with eight more coming in the next year. The result is more dynamic and varied matches, both in how you play and who you have to play against. Unlike the maps, it’s much easier to remember what each operator does, which helps the large roster not feel daunting to learn. You only really have to keep track of their special ability and what type of gun they might be using, but they’re still unique enough to leave ample room for different playstyles and strategies.

An operator like Mira completely changes the landscape of a map when picked, with the ability to put impenetrable one-way mirrors into otherwise solid walls. Other operators like Caveira, who can silence her footsteps and then interrogate downed enemies to learn the position of their teammates, or Vigil, who can become invisible to cameras and drones, are built to be played as aggressive, roaming defenders. Their presence enables new strategies that simply weren’t as viable at launch. Abilities like this have changed Siege in very real ways, and the increased options keep Siege from ever feeling repetitive.

Better still, the benefit of that variety can be felt even if you don’t have these new operators unlocked for yourself. I didn’t necessarily feel like I was at a disadvantage by not having any given character, as very few operators in Siege feel like either “must picks” or completely underpowered. I wished I could use certain locked operators, sure, but the 20 base operators that have been there from the beginning are still strong, fun, and varied enough to make the significantly higher Renown cost (Siege’s in-game currency) of any that came after them less frustrating.

You don’t start with any Operators unlocked, with the original 20 costing between 500 and 2,500 Renown, a relatively small amount that comes quickly enough from playing matches. All the new operators, however, are a massive 25,000. It can take at least 20 hours of play (on the low-end) to gather that much renown.