Rainbow Six Parasite gameplay leak finally reveals how it works

Early Rainbow Six Parasite testers have done what Ubisoft didn't want to.

Ubisoft recently kicked off a closed beta test for Rainbow Six Parasite/Quarantine. The invite-only test is NDA'd, meaning we shouldn't see any gameplay out of it. But this rarely works as intended.

As expected, someone who took part in the test had no problem sharing gameplay - over an hour's worth - to Facebook Gaming, of all things. It was a good choice of platform, too, because unlike YouTube and Twitch, Facebook is a lot slower on the draw when it comes to pulling copyrighted material.

The footage only shows the game's tutorial, but still gives us our best look yet at what we actually do in the game. Missions in Parasite are called Incursions, and they're split into three sub-zones. Each sub-zone has an objective that players need to achieve in order to advance to the next one. Every new sub-zone also ramps up the difficulty, but players can decide to extract, Black Ops Cold War Zombies-style, and keep their intel.

The objectives themselves vary, but appear to all be based around stealth. Some will task you with sneaking around the game's enemies - called Archaeans - to grab some samples, plant tracks and so on. If you're spotted, you'd have to fight off Archaeans. Parasite's enemies have heads that glow when they're about to spot you, which is very handy.

Though the droning phase Siege players should be familiar with doesn't appear to exist in Parasite, all operators have a drone the tutorial suggests using at the start of each phase to locate the target.

The tutorial wasn't heavy on the action, so it's not clear how much of Parasite's gameplay will be require slowly crouch-moving everywhere. Six of Siege's operators can be spotted in the alpha. They're Alibi, Lion, Vigil, Ela, Finka, and Tachanka. The speed and armour rating stats remain, and so does each of their unique ability/gadget, albeit modified a bit to make sense in a Parasite's PvE setting. After making your selection, you get to create a loadout from the usual assortment of weapons and attachments.

Unsurprisingly, there are some Left 4 Dead influences in Parasite, like the safe room - Airlocks - between sub-zones, and the fact fallen teammates can be rescued later into the level.