Rainbow Six Extraction’s Nightmare Fog will have you shooting at hallucinations

Ubisoft is launching a new “crisis event” dubbed Nightmare Fog today for its Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction co-op shooter game. It is a limited-time event that will test your operator’s senses as an unavoidable fog of toxins makes its way through the containment zone.

I played the Crisis Event at a Ubisoft preview event and naturally got pretty shredded in the game. But I enjoyed it, and apparently a lot of other people are having a good time with Rainbow Six Extraction, which saw more than five million players in its launch quarter.

In the game, up to three players can band together in a co-op fight against alien creatures who have invaded Earth and are breeding in a variety of urban hangouts. As with Rainbow Six Siege, you can choose your operator who specializes in certain skills that complement your squad’s strengths. Those abilities include roles such as medic and sniper.

You can go in with guns blazing, but you’ll have a crazy firefight as all of the aliens converge on you. It’s like Left4Dead with aliens instead of zombies. You can also operate in stealth mode and perform missions like taking out nests, capturing specimens, or rescuing colleagues.

The fog

What’s different about this event is a purple haze that descends on the battlefield. You start out in a safe zone where you can send your drones into the mission area to do recon. You can find various important points, but your drones always run out of batteries before you can scan the whole area. Then you move in and try to achieve your mission objectives. Only this time, as you are going through the fog.

As you move through the containment zone, exposure to the fog increases your neurotoxin level. After exposure reaches a certain level, this toxin creates psychedelic effects for operators, such as enemy hallucinations, disruptions that affect their vision, and deterioration that causes damage. If you fire at the hallucinations, they just break up into pixels. But if they scream and bleed, then you know they’re real.

The fog is produced by the parasites’ toxic tree. It’s a chemical hallucinogenic can alter an operator’s perception of reality. After too much exposure, you go nuts and start seeing things. To your teammates, you look like you’re shooting at nothing, while you think you’re gunning down some aliens. The hallucinations are both auditory and visual. Eventually, you start suffering from tunnel vision, motion blur, and distorted vision. And then you start losing health.

If you manage your neurotoxin level and can still distinguish real from fake, you can make your way through the fog to destroy the source, the toxic tree. Try as we did, my team never destroyed the tree in our two-hour play session. But we gave it our best.

We blasted holes in walls to shorten the distance had to go through the fog, but that always alerted a swarm of aliens to descend upon us. They came in waves and it was fun to mow them down until I inevitably ran out of ammo. I had to run through the place to find more ammo, but that often separated me from my squad.

To cure themselves, players can find a neurostim supply case that can temporarily remove a portion of an operator’s neurotoxin level — but you can only find a limited amount of neurostim supply cases in each Sub-map. This limited supply challenges players to adapt new strategies for incursions and be prepared to take on Archæans while fighting off psychedelic effects.

If you complete your missions, you’ll get exclusive rewards, including a new pistol which gives you a speed boost as well as invulnerability for 15 seconds.

To entice players back in, Ubisoft will let you level up operators by ten extra levels with a new prestige system. Players can jump in now with their squad via Game Pass on Xbox Series X | S, Xbox One, and Windows PC, as well as on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Stadia, Amazon Luna, Ubisoft+, the Ubisoft Store, and the Epic Games Store.

I enjoyed my time with it, but I think I’ve inhaled enough purple fog for a while.