Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint
PC, PS4, Stadia, Xbox One
Such a confusing knot of mission types, objectives and upgrade busywork that playing alone makes the most sense
Developer/publisher Ubisoft (Paris) Format PC (tested), PS4, Xbox One Release Out now
No words, just grunts. A wrecked heli billowing smoke on the horizon amid a thick carpet of tropical plant life, a kilometre or two from the one you just crawled away from, wheezing and bleeding. And a group of mercenaries making idle chit-chat as they stroll, oblivious, towards your position.
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint begins on a strong footing. For years it’s been pushed into the margins of the Ubisoft roster by IPs that harness the open-world game design blueprint more accessibly ( Assassin’s Creed) or with more of an edge ( Far Cry) but in its opening hour, Breakpoint clicks. You wander the vast landscapes of Auroa, a fictional island rendered in such detail that with the right light and angle it can appear photorealistic, with little to no interruption from expository cutscenes. Hired guns appear in twos and threes, and hiding behind a bush, you headshot them all before anybody even realises they’re in a gunfight.
It’s all surprisingly immersive. No longer is Ghost Recon the videogame Ray Mears, trying to convince you that waterproof trousers with pockets all over them are cool. It’s a convincing take on open-world survival and stealth, in an environment where modern military tech feels interesting and rewards lateral thinking in numerous ways. The token new mechanic which lets you roll in the mud when prone to camouflage yourself doesn’t feel so token. The syncshot grenades, which let you mark several enemies for synchronised takedown after lobbing out a drone, feel sneaky and delicious, and not cribbed from Splinter Cell’s ‘mark and execute mechanic’. Which they definitely are. But you don’t care.
There’s even the odd glimmer of a compelling narrative in those first few hours. A tech billionaire who’s retreated from prying eyes and pesky lawmakers to conduct nefarious experiments with drones. A former military hero and protagonist’s best buddy turned amoral PMC commander (and a spirited performance from Jon Bernthal). A bizarre indigenous cave community. Auroa holds a lot of intrigue when you’re just getting your bearings.
And then it goes and spoils it all by saying something stupid like ‘raids’, or ‘gear levels’, ‘choose your own objectives’ and ‘why not pay some real money for these outfits?’. In other words, Breakpoint stops being an experience and starts being a product. As such, it’s keen to fold Destiny- like systems into the survival, stealth and tactical shooter core, even though they don’t add much. For example, it’s important to source new weapons because they carry a value which contributes to your gear score, and that score unlocks activities like the aforementioned raids. But all weapons within a class feel the same. Only the arbitrary number attached to it changes. In the worst-case scenario, you might find yourself using a gun of a different category to that which suits your class, because it carries a higher number. All those points you sunk into being a great sniper, redundant as you wield a hulking LMG into battle.
The class system into which you spend those points is, by contrast, well-suited to Breakpoint’s fundamentals. Split into four strands, it guides players into actual cooperation in co-op artfully. Sharpshooters take up their vantage points and scope the area out, marking enemies for other players. Panthers ready their drones and smoke bombs for a stealthy entry, which assault soldiers and medics can make use of while they close in on the targets. If that all sounds a bit back-of-box marketing spiel, it’s all the more admirable that players often do behave in just that fashion. That’s when you’re matched with players of different classes. Currently about 75 per cent of the community are snipers, and in a game about taking out mercenaries on a massive open-world map you can hardly blame them.
And more often than not, it’s preferable to play solo. Damning as that is for a co-op-focused shooter, Breakpoint becomes such a confusing knot of mission types, objectives and upgrade busywork that playing alone makes the most sense. It’s too easy to lose track of what you’re supposed to be doing when you’re part of a group. It’s too tempting to accept another player’s request to change missions, go hunting for a weapon attachment, or play PvP instead (see ‘Summoning the dead’). And frankly, it’s better to die alone and respawn than to bleed out while a countdown timer ticks away.
If Breakpoint’s conceptual problems leave you lamenting the purity of its opening hours, the technical problems are enough for you to sign out entirely. Vehicle behaviour is sub- Just Cause, with only choppers providing a navigable means of long-term transport. Good luck turning a motorcycle around in less than a square mile. On PC, the game frequently seizes up for seconds at a time and can’t muster a consistent 60fps even at its lowest settings. On the fastest consumer graphics card currently available. In fact, changing the graphics options seems to make little difference on our system. We’re stuck with around 40fps whatever the preset, however many times we restart the game.
Breakpoint’s pièces de résistance are its physical comedy-inspiring glitches, though. The kind of bugs that went out in the mid-’00s, like spawning waist-high in the ground and then falling through the world map to your death, or riding on a helicopter while maintaining a ten-foot distance from it, sitting upright in mid-air.
For a brief moment, Ghost Recon Breakpoint captures the feeling of being a highly trained secret operative, lost and alone behind enemy lines, and it feels fantastic. but as it piles on system after system to incentivise long-play, it loses sight of why anyone would be drawn to it in the first place. The super-soldier fantasy’s lost beneath generic mechanisms for grinding.