Another fumbled open-world game from Ubisoft
TOM Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands was, for the most part, generally received with lukewarm appraise by the public, but with most people conceding that there was enough potential in its expansive sandbox world and exciting combat mechanics to make for a more polished and refined sequel. Well, that sequel is now here, in the form of Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint and have we finally been gifted the ground breaking open-world game the stealthy series deserves?
The answer is... Not really. Breakpoint is very much another fumbled open-world game from Ubisoft, whose developers clearly live in some sort of bubble, isolated from the real world where they could take cues from other developers on the do’s and don’t’s of open-world game design.
In typical Ubisoft fashion, the map is absolutely chock-filled of utterly meaningless busywork masquerading as worthwhile content. There’s a ton of main missions and side quests to sift through on the admittedly beautiful archipelago of Aurora, but it all just falls a little flat once you realise that there are very little actual unique tasks to complete. It doesn’t help that the Ubisoft déjà vu is further compounded by the hackneyed 30-odd-hour story that feels somewhat like Watch Dogs 2 with a costume change. Mercenary armies bla bla artificial intelligence bla bla surveillance bla bla... you get the gist.
Thankfully, one thing Breakpoint does do right is its extremely engaging gunplay and shooting mechanics. Weapon action just feels great and the progression climb through unlocking new weapons and gadgets and all sorts of instruments of death tends to be quite fun for the post part. Which is all fine and dandy of course, until you remember that Ghost Recon Breakpoint is supposed to be a stealth game, or at least a title that is largely based on the art of the unseen. It is rather disappointing that the game heavily dilutes the ‘behind-enemy-lines’ premise with weird hub-worlds in the mountains and its gentle insistence on gunning and looting because the actual stealth mechanics are numerous but often put to little use.
Much like Wildlands, Breakpoint will likely receive a bunch of bumper updates in the future that will improve the base game dramatically, but it always leaves a bad taste in the mouth when the Day 1 release of a much-anticipated game is so utterly mediocre.