GHOST RECON WILDLANDS
In which your crack squad takes on the crack squad
WHEN WE REVIEWED FarCryPrimal, we lamented that a Ubisoft studio had “made its game again.” Well, it’s happened once more, this time dragging a Tom Clancy franchise into the open world with it.
Your elite combat squad is in Bolivia to take down the head of the Santa Blanca drug cartel, a man with more lieutenants than the entire US Army. Those lieutenants need to be reduced to a thin red mist before you can have a crack at the top man.
Bolivia is cut from huge and beautiful cloth, but it’s a diaphanous fabric that exposes the size-zero bones of the supporting structure. Outposts are the bolts that hold the game together, and you raid them in the same way you did in Far Cry4, collecting intel, weapons, skill points, and other goodies, until you’re ready to take on the area’s boss character, after which you can move on to another part of the country (there are many), and do it all again.
The feeling of being able to tackle outposts in any way you want is palpable— frustrated by being spotted after a couple failed stealth infiltrations with the aim of stealing a car, we landed a helicopter on the garage roof, ran down a fire escape, and drove off into the night. A swift grenade took out a boss with a minigun, who could have leveled our entire squad. But this openended approach doesn’t mask the fact that it’s the same old thing over and over again.
There is some attempt to mix things up, with frantic cross-country chases to switch off radio beacons, convoys full of resources to be hunted down, and skills to be learned that boost your character’s abilities. The game is also designed with co-op play at its heart, as illustrated by the Sync Shot, which sees your team take out up to four bad guys at once. With no buddies to play with, you’re left with bots, who display the useful ability to see drug enforcers through hills and walls, and can teleport to catch up with you.
After playing “properly” in single-player, we soon learned to leave the bots behind, confident that they would pop into existence on the back seat of our truck. Teleporting bots make the dirt bikes you find dotted around useful for reconnaissance, as you can be sure your AI teammates will be there when you find some cartel soldiers, even though you left them back at base.
With this structure and focus on base-exploding, perhaps the most recent analog to Wildlands is JustCause3, rather than FutureSoldier. Run in, cause chaos, get out is as valid a way to play as sneaking around unseen, but the Ghosts’ drone is a poor replacement for Rico’s grappling hook.
Wildlands can be a hoot in co-op, as the interaction with real people glosses over its repetitive nature. A focus on breadth of experience—not landscape—might have gone a long way toward making this a more satisfying open-world game.