Hard experience has taught me that I am not, in my heart, a Rainbow Six Siege guy. In fact, I'm not really a Rainbow Six guy. The series' hardcore-ish squad-based first-person gameplay just never jibed with me going all the way back to 1998, when a five-year-old Josh got shot to death by eco-terrorists in about 0.3 seconds and promptly decided to play something else.

So colour me surprised that my brief, hands-off Gamescom demo with Rainbow Six Tactics not only blew my hair back, it quickly became one of my most-anticipated games of the show, and precisely because of the ways it blends together familiar XCOM-ish tactics gameplay with, well, a whole buncha Siege stuff.

United colours

Here's the pitch: a bunch of characters you last saw executing people in Siege have signed up for a new Rainbow organisation, under the command of Paul Bishop from Rainbow Six Vegas. Bishop is a bipedal breeze block who you, notionally, play as, but you only 'play' him in the way you play the commander in XCOM, from what I've seen. For the most part, you're either touching up Rainbow's base or giving orders in the field.

'In the field' was where we found ourselves at the demo's start. The Rainbow gang have infiltrated an industrial dock. Their aim is to make their way across it and into a warehouse at the other side.

This bit? All very XCOM (or, indeed, Mario + Rabbids, which several R6 Tactics devs worked on). You're moving your fellas about a field, setting up overwatch zones, and using their special abilities to take down foes. For instance, one of the characters in our demo squad was Montagne, who more-or-less functioned as a piece of moveable cover—the semi-circle area from which he could painlessly take attacks marked on the ground around his feet.

Also on our roster: Siege's sniper Glaz, who in Tactics can shoot in a great long line that can take out multiple enemies, if you rack 'em up. The game has no fog of war in its outside areas, making the guy with a gun that shoots really far something of a force of nature.

So far, so much a perfectly cromulent Rainbow-Six-flavoured take on XCOM-style tactics, but it's when the gang got to the warehouse that R6 Tactics began to show its hand. Our demoer did not just pile up her troops around the building's entryways and go—which is what I've done for years in all games remotely like this.

Instead, it all got very Siege. First up, the team deployed drones—the same little wheeled drones you've deployed in countless Siege matches as the attacker—to scope out the warehouse interior and pinpoint enemies. Unlike the outside world, interior spaces very much do have fog of war, and properly reconnoitering them looks, well, pretty important. It's a neat wrinkle in a familiar loop, and turns XCOM-style scouting (the process by which you send one fast trooper dashing off to see what's up before having them dash back) into a more fleshed-out phase of the operation.

It's rather important you do it properly, because the next thing we saw was R6 Tactics' Breach mode. Rather than kicking the doors of the warehouse in, our demoer plotted out every member of the team's moves and attacks ahead of time, using the interior map established by her earlier drone reconnaissance. Once it was all plotted out, she hit go, and everyone moved simultaneously, the squad taking up their assigned positions and shooting several people in the face along the way, in ways that probably aren't in-keeping with official military rules of engagement.

Some more Siege: plenty of the roughhousing had impacts on the warehouse itself. Shots and explosions destroyed parts of the level they passed through, with one in particular from Glaz seeming to pass through a flimsy wall and out the other side, into the waiting skull of someone who assuredly deserved it. This is, I'm not afraid to say it, cool as hell, and a smart transplant of one of Siege's most interesting features into a new arena that's nonetheless wholly suited for it.

And then? Well, the Scooby gang found a man with a beard and some plot and had to lead him to safety—out of the warehouse and into a waiting boat. This was mostly a replay, mechanically, of the demo's opening, with the added complexity of spending accrued 'Order Points' to buff the team.

These are small-but-handy things—more damage, increased movement—that could be pivotal to the flow of battle if used right, and the rub is that your enemies get them too. As you faff about with beard-man, trying to get him and your squad to the boat, a turn-counter ticks down in the lower reaches of the screen, indicating when your foes will next get to buff themselves. It's not a major thing, but it's smart: another sign that the people making Rainbow Six Tactics have put proper thought into the overall flow of gameplay.

It might have been a relatively quick glimpse, and I still have a lot of questions (like what the HQ half of the game is like), but as a starving XCOM fan I was absolutely intrigued by what I saw of R6 Tactics. Between this and Star Wars Zero Company, I feel like I'm eating better than I have done in years.