Rainbow Six Siege tips for the free weekend, direct from the developer

It's another Rainbow Six Siege free weekend this weekend (running from now until August 20), giving you the chance to try the entire game for zero dollar, and see if its brand of defence and assault based multiplayer fuels your fire. 

There's a lot to learn though, with numerous playable characters and abilities to master, and hugely destructible maps that can change the flow of battle with one well placed hole. Fortunately, we've got some essential Rainbow Six Siege tips from Ubisoft's Craig Robinson to help you out. Here's how he recommends you ease into the Siege's tactical shooter world. 

• The best Rainbow Six Siege Operators for beginners

1) Communication is key

"You need to talk with your teammates", explains Robinson. Siege is a game built on situation awareness and the ability to tell teammates where the opposition are, and what enemies (and abilities) are coming is vital. "That's something you absolutely want to do," he says. "Even if you die in the first five seconds of every round you’re still able to support your team through the use of cameras and drones and callouts. And so that plays back into how important and integral communication is the player experience as a whole."

2) Be patient

"Don’t rush into it. Take your time, it’s a steep learning curve," Robinson points out. There are several reasons why. For starters running around is the easiest way to die fast. Both because of exposing yourself to enemy fire and the brutal Time To Kill, and also because in the tight spaces any noise you make can give you away. However, you also need to adjust some of Siege's unique characteristics. "With the destructible environments, every time you play a map it’s going to be a little different," Robinson explains. "So take your time to really learn and understand what’s going on. And be prepared to die a little bit."

3) Practice offline to learn guns, maps and tactics

Rainbow Six has some offline modes that function as tutorials and practice modes, specifically 'Situations', which are like practice runs against bots, and the PvE mode Terrorist Hunt. "Do the situations first to get you some base level familiarity with the weapons and gunplay," says Robinson. "You could try a little Terrorist Hunt to help you get more familiar with the maps. Maybe focus on a single map and run it a few times so you kind of understand the overall layout. Then you should be able to jump into casual, and work with your team to figure out where you fit in." 

4) Don't be afraid to ask for help

"We have a great guide our Reddit moderators created that’s a new player guide that will walk any players through Operators, and which ones are good for new players, what they do, walk through some of the maps," says Robinson. "I highly recommend anyone coming in this weekend to check that out."

Then there's the recently launched R6 Academy. "That’s a great resource for new players," he says, "because it has these video guides from content creators who’ve been playing Siege for years about how to play Operators, how to play certain maps and things like that."

See what else you can pull a trigger at with our best FPS games list.