Rainbow Six Sieges match replay tool is a cheaters worst nightmare

For the past five years, Rainbow Six Siege has been the only game that gets me paranoid about cheaters. It's not something that comes up in every match I play, but when I do see something suspicious from an enemy or teammate, it's all I can think about. I spend the rest of the match looking for signs, examining their profile, and deliberating on whether or not I should report them.

The problem is that cheating can be really hard to detect in Siege, where a normal round often includes non-cheaters using sound and game sense to headshot someone straight through a wall. Good Siege players look like they could be hacking even when they aren't, so when a cheater comes along with a wallhack or an aimbot, it's not hard for them to masquerade as the real deal. That is, until Match Replay finally arrived last month.

Match Replay automatically records all of your recent matches and lets you play them back in-game from the perspective of any player. Fans have enjoyed replays for years in shooters like Overwatch and CS:GO as a way to improve their game or save memorable moments. Most important to Siege, however, is the tool's ability to finally answer the question: Was that guy cheating?

Oh, come on.

There is nowhere for a wallhacker to hide in Siege anymore. As you can see, replays show every player's outlines by default (similar to watching Siege esports). Instead of spectating a suspicious player to see if they might be tracking people through walls unrealistically, you can roughly simulate what they would be seeing if wallhacks were active. Watching clips like this feels validating, even if the cheater still ruined the actual match

Crafty cheaters can pretend they're not looking through walls or purposefully miss a few shots here and there, but experienced players know what real instinct looks like. Things are different now that you can always jump into the shoes of the offender after the fact and scrutinize every twitch of their camera.

Now, if only the rest of Match Replay wasn't so janky. The feature is in beta, so bugs are expected, but Ubisoft has a long way to go before it's a robust anti-cheat tool. Elements sometimes render incorrectly in-game (weapons might get misaligned or hands might disappear) and there are too many confusing hotkeys buried in settings menus. Worst of all is that you can't report players from inside the tool. Siege's built-in reporting options only appear while you're in an active game, so reporting a cheater retroactively requires you to hunt down the username and submit a report on Ubisoft's support site. Yuck. If at any point I have to load an external site to tell the game that someone is cheating, the game has failed me.

Still, Match Replay is a crucial step forward for the competitive FPS. I expect most players to use it for recording highlights (which anyone with an Nvidia card should already be doing with Shadowplay), but I see myself using it most often to learn from better players. I used to try to suss out how an enemy heard me coming from the brief perspective I see in the killcam, but now I can watch their entire process if I want. That's really neat.