Ubisoft are making an XCOM-style Rainbow Six game inspired by Siege, claim reports

I fondly cherish my many memories of claustrophobia, confusion and terror in Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege. I can't get enough of the experience of being lodged behind the furniture like some teenager's hurriedly hidden copy of Loaded (or whatever the kids are reading now), rifle pivoting wildly between barricaded doors and windows, as enemy players bustle around the roof like awful, C4-toting pigeons.

Still, every now and then I do feel the urge for some kind of proper, real-time tactical overview. Don't we have drones for that, Mr Clancy? As such, I'm moderately pleased to hear that Ubisoft are working on a top-down turn-based game set in the Rainbow Six universe.

The rumour in question comes from Insider Gaming, who appear to have access to a whole wardrobe full of Ubisoft's dirty laundry, and are now skulking inside that wardrobe with a shotgun. The project is allegedly one or two years from release. As it stands, it's said to play a lot like XCOM, but with fixtures and a "loop" borrowed from Siege: you'll pick operators based on their skills to raid buildings and save hostages, all the Clancy favourites. It's said to last approximately 25-30 hours. The report has been corroborated by Kotaku's Ethan Gach, who adds in the latest Dead Game newsletter that the project is codenamed Slice & Dice and is led by Elie Benhamou, the game director for Ghost Recon: Breakpoint.

The estimable Rock Paper Shotgun verdict on Breakpoint was that it broadly sucked arse, despite a meticulously-woven open world. The rumoured "Slice & Dice" concept seems promising, however, particularly if it can incorporate all the tricky things Siege players do with destructible surfaces.

Assuming the reports are legit, I imagine the major worry for the project's developers right now is the potential impact of Ubisoft's carving out of a new Tencent-backed subsidiary for their most profitable games - that's Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and Rainbow Six.

We're still waiting for a proper, top-down tactical overview of how this subsidiary will be run: the deal covers studios in Montreal, Quebec, Sherbrooke, Saguenay, Barcelona, and Sofia, but the number of individual developers involved remains to be determined. It's also not clear how developers might move back and forth between the new subsidiary and the rest of Ubisoft: Siege's development is led by Ubisoft Montreal, but features contributions from teams based in Toronto, Kyiv, Shanghai and Chengdu.