A fine posse of Rainbow Six Siege operators have yeehawed up for a new limited time event, Showdown. Ubisoft surprise-dropped the Showdown mode alongside a new map, Fort Truth. It's only running for two weeks, but I'm already wishing it'd stay around longer.

Fort Truth is a very small map, consisting mostly of outdoor ruins and a central church. The mode is 3v3 elimination with short 90 second rounds. Instead of Siege's usual automatic assault rifles, everyone's equipped with a BOSG double-barreled slug shotgun reskinned to look like a Wild West-era repeater rifle and a trust revolver. Showdown matches are brief, but extremely tense.

Compared to Siege's last LTM, Rainbow Is Magic, Showdown is refreshing. There was novelty to RIM's reskinned Plane map and sugar-coated sound effects, but Showdown gives players a brand new mode that feels completely different from typical Siege. Defenders can venture outside Fort Truth without being spotted, which racks up the tension when a round begins. The BOSG and revolver are tough weapons to shoot accurately under stress, but it only takes one or two shots to go down.

Best of all, Fort Truth is just a really cool map. It's light on destruction, but heavy on cover and little details that make Siege maps feel alive. It'd be a real shame if the map truly went away after the two week event. I reached out to Ubi on Twitter to see if they're considering keeping the map available in custom games, but I haven't heard back yet.

The only blemish on the event is, unfortunately, the premium Showdown packs that Ubi is hoping you'll buy. Most of the Showdown skins are lackluster (par for the course with Siege) with a few exceptions, like Maestro's badass "Sheriff Black" headgear seen above.

I'd love to get my hands on Hot Cowboy Maestro, but since event skins can't be bought piecemeal like the rest of Siege's cosmetics, my only option is to keep buying packs until it pops up. And that can get expensive—buying all 31 Showdown cosmetics costs about $70. Yea, no thanks Ubi.

Rainbow Six Siege Showdown is free for all players to try out and is running from today through July 16. Hopefully, Fort Truth won't disappear with it.

Co-operation? Teamwork? Totally overrated. A YouTuber called Basically Homeless has proved that you can win matches in Rainbow Six Siege all on your own, even in ranked mode. All you have to do is get five PCs with separate Siege accounts all in the one room, get your mouse and keyboard hooked up to a switcher, and then somehow have the dedication to keep playing over the cacophony of five games going on at once. You can see how he managed it in the video above.

Rather than try to switch between characters constantly he tended to play them one by one, treating each death as a respawn. He used the information he gathered about the enemy's location from one life to hit them hard in the next, playing aggressively rather than defending. Sometimes, especially in casual, it went OK!

While I can't imagine anyone else trying this—the nightmare of all those matchmaking errors alone would have made me give up, even if I had five PCs to begin with—it's still an impressive feat and it made for a fun video.

With Rainbow Six Siege's Operation Phantom Sight kicking off this week, we've entered the season for leaks. If a new info dump on ResetEra by reliable leaker Kormora is to be believed, the operators gadgets for Siege's Year 4 Season 3 are coming into focus.

Kormora's source shared the function of both Year 4 Season 3 operator gadgets. The attacker uses a grappling hook to quickly ascend up to windows and through hatches. We first reported this info back in April, so nothing totally new there, but it is further confirmation. The defender is a new story, though. They use a "special deployable shield" equipped with a canister that drops fire on the ground when destroyed.

The special deployable shield is consistent with how the Season 3 defender has been described to me. I've also been told the fire canister can be remotely triggered by the defender, similar to Smoke's area-denying gas canisters. It's unclear if the shield has any other unique properties or how its appearance will compare to a typical deployable shield.

Both the grappling hook and shield gadgets are also backed up by an easter egg hidden in Nøkk's concept art posted by Ubisoft (pictured above). On the chalkboard in the background, you can spot references to a grappling hook and some sort of gas canister with "BURN?" written above. Both gadgets were described to me months before this concept art was public, so the legitimacy looks increasingly solid.