Solid Snake Comes to Rainbow Six – Hands-On With Latest Operator

The biggest news to come out of the Year 11 Roadmap reveal was the Solid Snake Rainbow Six Operator! The iconic protagonist of the Metal Gear series joins the attackers with his unique brand of detection, making him an ideal sneaky entry Operator.

During an event in Paris, to coincide with the Six Invitational 2026 in Paris, we got a chance to play a few games of Year 11, crucially, including Solid Snake. We also got a chance to chat with the folks in charge of Siege Esports, if that’s more your style.

Solid Snake Rainbow Six Operator – A Silent Attacker

Solid Snake will join Siege as a new attacker, working as an “intel-first” Operator, with his trusty Tacit.45 Pistol by his side (as his secondary). Alongside his iconic gun, Snake will feature the Solition Radar MK. III as his gadget, which will reveal threats in the area. “Focusing” lets you pinpoint the exact location, but it drains the battery much faster.

When an enemy is spotted, you’ll hear the iconic “detected” sound from the MGS series, a lovely nod to the character’s past. Very fitting for the more whimsical side of the MGS series.

The most unique part of the kit for Solid Snake Rainbow Six, however, is the OSP Pouch, acting as a second gadget, though, in this case, a passive one. Snake begins each round with just one grenade-type gadget or a breach charge.

However, the bodies of fallen Operators. Both enemy or ally, drop a utility pouch, which Snake can take and select an item to use via a new UI option in-game. These include any grenade gadget, not just the one he selected earlier, and you can do this for all nine of the enemies in a round if the situation were to arise.

In one of our rounds as the Solid Snake Rainbow Six Operator (a map where we secured an ace, not to brag), one of our team members died early, but the enemy defender remained in the area. While we had selected a normal HE Grenade as our start, we were able to secure a smoke grenade from the body of our downed teammate.

Using this, we smoked the entrance to the room, using our scanner to wait for them to leave. Lucky for us, the defender must have thought we snuck by, so as they left, we waited in the breach gap and took them out as they returned, having not found us.

His kit is great. As always it’ll be intresting to see how it fares in R6 esports too. And while our example is just one we saw, many of the players at the event were having similar interesting interactions using Snake’s kit. One thing we found in our team was using Snake as a sort of spotter attacker, having him call out “in the bedroom by the bed area,” giving your team a vague idea of how many targets and where they were. It can also be a great way of deciding.

The Kit in Review

Solid Snake Rainbow Six will feature two Primary weapon options, the F2 and the PMR90A2, alongside his secondary option of the Tacit.45 pistol. It’s a good kit from our playtime, though expect a lot of players to just use his Tacit.45 pistol in their first few rounds. That was the case at the preview, which makes sense, and it does lead to the thought of the chances of an Operator just having a secondary, and if you could balance that.

We suspect that the conversation probably happened with Snake.

Outside of his kit, Snake Rainbow Six will be a 1 Health, 3 Speed Operator. Which fits well with what he brings to the team. As we mentioned in our section above, the full kit offers up a good variety of Snake, and how he will be used once he’s unleashed to the wider playerbase will be interesting.

In a brief time playing with him and watching others, the initial plan was many is to try and play him as a solo entry Operator. However, we think he’s going to thrive with good communication, feeding information to his team to pin down defenders.

Overall, we really liked our time with Solid Snake, and look forward to playing him more once he’s released. One final little thing that many probably did notice, the voice actor for Snake was indeed David Hayter, who will return as the voice of Snake for Rainbow Six Siege.