GHOST RECON WILDLANDS
This Bolivian-based open-world shooter is more Pepsi than coke
Ubisoft’s latest open-world offering has been in development for a long time. Four years, in fact. While you might assume that means it’s superpolished, you’d be gravely mistaken. The only things more rife than drugs in this vast swathe of virtual Bolivia are bugs – and I’m not talking about hyperactive, cocaine-powered mosquitoes. In one mission, my co-op teammate and I pick through a farmhouse, silencers equipped, clearing rooms as we go. There’s only two of us – all three AI soldiers vanish when you’re joined by even a single real player – but we can still hear the spectral comms of two other teammates. We reach our destination. It’s a man with a big gun and he knows we’re here, despite our stealthy entry. He’s a boss, so he can take more than one bullet to the head, but we gun him down anyway and go outside to celebrate.
Next, I try to show my friend how inconsistent the environmental destruction is. Thing is, he can’t find me. I’m standing right next to him, but on his screen I’m completely invisible. The only way I can even interact is via the language of grenades, so I blow up a nearby helicopter like a commando poltergeist. He sees that. Ghost Recon indeed.
FEELING SPOOKED
Ghost Recon Wildlands is ambitious, huge, and beautiful. It’s also riddled with issues. Take that boss fight: during it, neither of us even realise we’re at a boss. That’s because, structurally, Ghost Recon Wildlands is as messy as its UI. In true Ubisoft fashion, icons pepper a map rammed full of missions, side missions and collectibles. You hold r on these collectibles to get experience points: oil drums, medals, weapons, weapon accessories and even skill points (used to level up your soldier) can be procured by hoovering up map icons.
To trigger a mission, you have to grab intel – another thing you need to hold r on – that’s stashed inside enemy compounds. Get intel and you unlock the next mission in the region, which you continue to do until you unlock the cartel boss of that area. Until you settle into this strange rhythm, you feel like you’re doing things at random, and awful dialogue doesn’t do much to help. At one point, your handler describes someone as “more popular than a teenager on the pill”. When under fire, your character often yells “sh*tballs”. Yup.
The story is just as tonally confused: America is cleaning up Bolivia’s drug problem by having unsanctioned shootouts in its towns. You’ll often accidentally pop a civilian’s head in the middle of a gunfight, but you won’t care, because the AI is so daft that they don’t feel
human anyway. Still, the game tries to make this meaningful by punishing players who shoot friendlies, de-spawning them and plonking them a kilometre away from the action. It’s like a walk of shame: Ubisoft’s naughty corner.
CALL OF NATURE
Bolivia is massive, too, making these trudges even more painful. It’s the bestlooking world Ubisoft has yet created, reproducing the overwhelming vastness of nature in the shape of muddy peaks, dense jungles, wide salt flats, snaking rivers and ominous mountains, but it’s at the expense of gameplay.
Get caught by an enemy helicopter with the wrong weapon on the plains and you’re dead in seconds – there’s no cover for miles. Some missions can be a 20-minute drive, even though they’re a couple of kilometres away, thanks to mountain switchbacks that seem to twist upwards forever.
Despite all this jankiness, there’s still some fun to be had with Wildlands. It’s novel to drop your friends off by parachute as you pilot a helicopter. The same goes for seeing a distant enemy drop in a cloud of red mist because your friend is covering your approach. Guns feel great, and the ballistics model ensures you need to consider every shot, accounting for bullet drop. Vehicles are fun, though the underlying physics model often undermines them. Much like most of the actual game undermines the fun of hanging out with your mates, really.
VERDICT
It feels like a game that’s been buried in a time capsule, releasing just after open-world game design has moved on. Solo play is pointless, and fun with friends is fleeting. Kirk McKeand