Rainbow Six Tactics blends XCOM strategy with Siege mechanics — and it works

Rainbow Six Tactics turned out to be one of the standout demos at Gamescom this year, and not for the reasons anyone expected. The game takes Siege operators and drops them into a full turn-based tactics framework — think XCOM or Mario + Rabbids — and the combination clicks in ways that are hard to dismiss.

The demo opened with a squad infiltrating an industrial dock, moving through cover, setting up overwatch zones, and using operator-specific abilities. Montagne functions as mobile cover, with a semi-circle on the ground showing the arc from which he can absorb fire. Glaz can shoot in a straight line long enough to chain through multiple enemies at once. Outside areas have no fog of war, which makes a long-range sniper genuinely dominant in the open. The player character is Paul Bishop from Rainbow Six Vegas, who acts as the commander — present on the field but controlled the way XCOM lets you direct your squad rather than fight directly. Several developers on the project previously worked on Mario + Rabbids, and that lineage shows in the clean, readable tactical layout.

Where Tactics separates itself from a straight XCOM clone is indoors. Interior spaces do have fog of war, and clearing it requires deploying the same wheeled drones Siege attackers have used for years — scouting rooms, tagging enemies, building a picture of the space before anyone breaches. That recon phase feeds directly into Breach mode, where you plot every squad member's movement and action simultaneously, then execute the whole plan at once. The result is a coordinated multi-angle entry that plays out in real time after you commit — closer to planning a Siege round than taking a XCOM turn. It's a smart structural split: open ground plays like classic tactics, and buildings play like Siege prep.

The demo was hands-off, so there's still plenty unknown about how the full game holds up over a campaign. But for a game that could easily have felt like a cynical genre mash, Rainbow Six Tactics showed enough mechanical identity at Gamescom to land as one of the more surprising highlights of the show.