Rainbow Six Tactics Turns Cover Into a Resource You Spend
Flanking is a spatial answer to a positional problem. When the map itself can be spent, that answer gets a lot more expensive.
In the Gamescom hands-off demo, Glaz fires a single high-powered round through two interior walls and drops a terrorist on the far side. Two holes, one dead body. It reads like set dressing — the kind of thing XCOM 2 already gave us a decade ago, with its breachable floors and blown-out rooftops. I'd have shrugged it off too.
Then the developer sentence lands, and it's the whole design in nine words: it changes the notion of safety for the enemies, but also for you.
My position, stated early: destruction isn't interesting because it lets you shoot through walls. It's interesting because it turns cover from a position into a spend.
In every tactics game I've sunk serious hours into, cover is geography. It's a fact about the map. You flank it, you flush it, you throw one grenade at it and move on with your day. A wall that stays breached is a different animal. It's gone for the rest of the mission — for both sides. You didn't take away the enemy's cover. You took away cover. Now you're standing in the open next to them.
I learned this feeling somewhere unexpected: Worms Armageddon. In Worms, the terrain was never scenery. It was a resource both players depleted, and by the end of a long match the hill you were both hiding behind is a crater field. The game stops being about aiming and starts being about whether an angle of attack still exists in a landscape that no longer offers one. Blow a hole to reach your opponent and you've blown a hole your opponent can drop airstrikes through. That's the same knot Rainbow Six Tactics is tying. Not "I can shoot through walls." Rather: there is less wall now, and I did that.
Flanking, after all, is a spatial answer to a positional problem. Cover exists, so you go around it. That whole logic assumes the map is stable and only the units move. Destruction breaks the assumption. If the map itself is depleting and opening, flanking stops being the correct response and becomes one option among several, each with a price tag. Do I spend a breaching charge to open a lane I'll need three turns from now? Do I open a lane the other side gets to use first? That's not a shooting problem. That's budgeting.
Here's where my skepticism lives, and I'll say it plainly. The tech isn't the hard part. Silent Storm did fully destructible multi-floor buildings in 2003, and the AI would cheerfully blow the floor out from under your squad. It was astonishing. It also meant that by the third act, every carefully designed map had been reduced to an open pit — because destruction real enough to matter is destruction that can erase the designer's intent for a space. I don't think that's fatal. I do think it's a cost, and I want to know the team has priced it in.
Because the other half of that sentence — "but also for you" — is the half that's easy to fake. Enemy safety eroding is a spectacle. Your safety eroding is a decision. If the AI doesn't understand that the wall it was hiding behind is now a window it can be shot through, you've built a demolition sandbox and called it a tactics game.
This is for the people who spent an entire turn setting up a flank and felt something click when it landed. For the ones who bounced off Siege because the destruction came at them too fast to think about, and who want to think about it for a while.
The wall used to do two jobs. Now it does one. That's not a graphics feature. That's a rule change.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. It's a turn-based squad tactics game with Rainbow operators, closer in structure to XCOM than to Siege. The difference the developers are pushing is that destruction permanently alters the map state rather than being a one-off grenade effect you fire and forget.
XCOM 2 lets you punch holes in floors and walls, but those holes are mostly tactical opportunities for you. In Rainbow Six Tactics the breach persists as a two-way sightline, so cover is depleted for both sides at once. You're not removing the enemy's cover, you're removing cover.
No. The operators will be familiar if you've played Siege, and the destruction is clearly built on the same philosophy, but this is a separate turn-based game. Knowing Siege's maps and gadgets will make you faster at reading angles, not more capable of playing it.
"Rainbow Six Tactics is only as good as its AI's understanding that a hole in the wall is a two-way street — the destruction is the pitch, but the enemy's response to it is the game."
— TED
