Rainbow Six Siege’s New Game Mode, Dual Front, Is The Perfect Way To Start Playing

After ten years since its initial release, Rainbow Six Siege has become a monster. A tangle of live-service updates have twisted Ubisoft’s hero shooter into one of the most imposing, uncrackable games out there. Dozens of maps demand you learn every inch and pixel-perfect hidey hole, with a near-infinite configuration of operators fighting on either side with their own abilities to master. It’s a lot.

Fortunately, with the new X update, Siege is introducing Dual Front. A new mode that brushes away at least some of the more complicated trappings is just what the game needs, and Dual Front could well be the ideal way to break into Siege in 2025.

Siege has always been difficult. It rewards quick reactions and superhuman situational awareness, with enemies coming from all directions, making lines of sight the smallest of cracks in which you can be taken out with a single, well-placed shot. It’s also been traditionally unforgiving, as death means sitting out of the rest of the round, much like Counter-Strike or other tactical FPS titles.

You Won’t Need A Breach Charge To Get Into Siege

Dual Front still captures this high-stakes atmosphere, but makes it less a test of patience and frustration by borrowing the best ideas from both MOBAs and hero shooters. Games are now focused on a single large map that forces your team to split between pushing on one lane and defending on the other. To achieve this, you’re picking from a reduced roster of operators, and, for the first time, can freely mix defenders and attackers on the same team to get the job done.

Dual Front as an onboarding tool isn’t just a happy accident – Ubisoft has intentionally designed the mode with the goal of improving the new player experience. At the heart of it are three stages: new players want to discover, intermediate players want to learn, and veterans want to master.

The smaller roster also encourages you to get past the decision paralysis of Siege’s sprawling list of operators, and discover who you enjoy playing as. There are enough to sink your teeth into, and monthly rotations will keep the metagame fresh, but it feels a lot less restrictive than being pigeonholed into a role in the other modes. If you want to learn Jackal, and he’s in the roster for that month, you’re able to play him as much as you like, instead of being made to play a whole round as Goyo or Kaid on the other team.

Respawning also plays a huge part in Dual Front, which isn’t something Siege has featured before. Dying will put you out of action for a fairly long time, but during that time you’re able to reconsider your strategy, swapping out for a different operator if your current one isn’t working out.

Thanks to the presence of one large map, you now have more time to learn what’s going on. You can master the rotations, which walls open into which vantage points, and which windows you’ll get a bullet in the head for peeking through. Instead of vaguely learning a dozen maps (including new modernized ones also coming in the update), you can focus on just one as you pick up the key skills of Siege, before transferring to other, more ruthless modes.

Still Unmistakably Siege

It’ll be interesting to see how the existing Siege audience takes to Dual Front. I’m sure there will be a contingent of veterans who balk at the idea of respawning, and miss the careful teambuilding of the main modes. Dual Front is a very different game mode to anything we’ve had before, but, in all the ways that matter, it still feels like bona fide Rainbow Six Siege.

Time to kill is still incredibly low, and you’re still having to make use of every gadget and skill at your operator’s disposal. Teamwork is crucial as you open up lines of sight and attack from unpredictable angles. However, it also feels like a streamlining of the game that was really needed after a decade of content updates cluttering up the core experience.

Dual Front is the first time in a long time I’ve been excited to play Siege. Like many, I fell off somewhere around year three or four, and have tried multiple times in the interim to get back into it. I love the gunplay and freedom in tackling your enemies the game offers, but have regularly been overwhelmed by everything I’ve missed since. Dual Front cuts through that by offering a rarity: something refreshingly new for a decade-old game. Maybe it’ll pull me back in enough to brush up on my Sledge skills and give ranked another whirl?

Released

December 1, 2015

ESRB

M for Mature: Blood, Drug Reference, Strong Language, Violence

Developer(s)

Ubisoft Montreal