For the past five years, "Rainbow Six Siege" has been the only game that makes me paranoid about cheaters. Not every match has a cheater, but when I see something suspicious about an opponent or teammate, it's all I can think about. For the rest of the match, I would look for signs, profile my opponents, and wonder if I should report them.

The problem is that it is really hard to spot cheaters in Siege. Often in a normal round, a non-cheater player will use sound and game sense to headshot someone through a wall. A good Siege player can look like a hacker even if they aren't, so it's not hard to impersonate the real thing if a cheater comes in with a wall hack or an Aimbot. Until last month, when Match Replay finally appeared.

Match Replay automatically records all of your recent matches and allows you to replay them in-game from any player's perspective; in shooter games like Overwatch and CS:GO, fans have been using replays for years as a way to improve their game and preserve memorable moments. have enjoyed. But most importantly for "Siege," the tool ultimately answers the question: was that guy cheating?

Well, that was definitely cheating.

Yeah, so are those guys.

Oh, come on.

There's no place for wallhackers to hide in Siege anymore. As you can see, replays show outlines of all players by default (similar to watching Siege esports). Instead of observing whether suspicious players are unrealistically tracking people through walls, you can roughly simulate what they would see if wall hacking were enabled. Such clips make the cheater feel justified, even if they are still ruining the real game

A cunning cheater can pretend not to see through walls or miss a shot here and there on purpose, but an experienced player will have real instincts knows what it looks like. But the experienced player knows what real instincts look like.

Now if only the rest of the match replay wasn't so clunky. This feature is in beta, so bugs are to be expected, but Ubisoft has a long way to go before it becomes a solid anti-cheat tool. The rendering of elements in the game can be strange (weapons can be misaligned, hands can disappear), and there are too many confusing hotkeys in the settings menu. Worst of all, you can't report players from within the tool; Siege's built-in reporting option only appears during an active game, so to retroactively report a cheater, you have to find the username and file a report on Ubisoft's support site. Yikes. This game is failing me when I have to load an external site to tell the game that someone is cheating.

Still, match replay is an important step forward for competitive FPS. While I think most players will use it to record highlights (those with Nvidia cards will already be doing this with Shadowplay), I find myself using it most often to learn from better players. I used to try to figure out how the enemy was hearing my attacks from the brief perspective on the killcam, but now I can see the enemy's entire process if I need to. It's really great.