After the disappointment that was Tom Clancy’s The Division, Ubisoft makes another attempt at creating a tactical co-op shooter that’s supposed to be next big thing in gaming. Has Ubisoft learned from their mistakes and finally made a good tactical shooter that keeps you interested for more than a few hours?
Free Bolivia
Ghost Recon: Wildlands takes place in Bolivia, South America. The country is ruled by the notorious El Sueño, who rules with an iron fist. After an attack on an embassy that kills an undercover spy, the mighty U.S. of A. sends a spec-ops squad called the Ghosts to take down El Sueño and his Santa Blanca Cartel. In order to reach El Sueño, you have to dismantle four operations that form the cartel: security, smuggling, production and influence. Each operation is controlled by underbosses that have their own private soldiers or ‘buchons’ at their disposal. Taking down these operations will take you across desert plains, jungles, mountains, salt flats and other biomes. The map is incredibly big and offers a lot of places in Wildlands to explore and liberate. As you may have guessed at this point, freeing Bolivia won’t be an easy task.
But bigger isn’t always better, which is the case in Wildlands. While the map itself looks great, there are no memorable areas to be found. The only way of navigating the map is by remembering in which type of biome you have to be and then hope for the best. Some of the settlements you have to attack are different enough to recognize them when you see them in the distance, but there’s nothing unique to them. The repetitive mission design also doesn’t help in differentiating locations. Every mission in an area is either “kill that guy” or “interrogate this guy”. Yes, you can also attack some convoys to obtain resources, but even those are all the same. It’s the same vehicle every time and obtaining its cargo requires almost no effort. Ghost Recon Wildlands was developed with the same kind of mindset as in The Division: design a couple of mission types, copy and paste those a hundred times and spread them around the map. Sounds repetitive? It is.
Tactics and guns
Ubisoft has dropped the loot system from The Division and replaced it with deep gun customization. At the start of the game, you don’t have that many options when it comes to your character’s load out. But there are a lot of guns and gun components to be found in Bolivia, which can enhance your gameplay experience, especially if your teammates are also equipped with custom-designed weapons. There’s something satisfying about finding a new component for your favorite weapon, although most of those components are earned by completing the repetitive missions. But I must say, it makes those missions a little more tolerable.
Next to the guns are also some tactical gameplay mechanics that enhance the gameplay a little. You can scout an enemy camp with your binoculars or with the much more useful drone. Simply let it take flight and tag your enemies in order to keep track on them. But the most fun addition to the game is the synchronized shot. This neat little mechanic lets you tag multiple enemies and take them out at the same time by assigning each individual tag to your teammates. It’s fun to pull off shots like that, but it makes the game a little too easy. The enemy AI is not exactly that smart and is easy to exploit, especially of you’re playing with friends. If you’re playing on your own, then your squadmates AI isn’t that much better. They often ‘hide’ right in front of the enemy and take forever to kill a single hostile NPC. They’re pretty useful for reviving you when you get shot, though.
Land, Sea and Air
Contrary to The Division, Wildlands is filled with all kinds of vehicles that can be used to transport you and your squad to a designated area. Cars, motorbikes, boats, helicopters and even tanks are useable in the game. These make traversing Bolivia a piece of cake, if you can handle the controls, that is. Most of the vehicles are fairly easy to control, but the helicopters are almost frustrating to use. When flying a helicopter, you constantly have to keep your aircraft from spinning around and losing altitude. After messing around with the controls for a bit, I found out that holding both buttons for increasing AND decreasing altitude stops you from losing altitude and makes your helicopter a little more stable. But even then it was still trying to spin around. The game doesn’t offer any explanation on how to properly use helicopters, so if you were to buy it, I’d suggest you look up some guides on Youtube on how to fly those things around.
Co-op
The main selling point of Wildlands is probably its co-op mode. You can play the game with up to three friends or strangers on the internet to complete missions or simply play around in the open world of Bolivia. After playing a couple of hours in co-op, I must say that playing together with actual people makes the game much more fun. Yes, the missions are still repetitive, but playing them in co-op encourages you to try different tactics and attack enemy camps from multiple sides at once. It’s also pretty fun to race each other across the gigantic map on motorcycles or to blow each other up with tanks. The co-op mode is clearly what the developers focussed most of their time on and makes the game a lot more enjoyable.
Weird technical issues
Like most other games developed by Ubisoft, Wildlands is filled with bugs and glitches. Vehicles clip through objects, enemies sometimes teleport from one point of cover to another, some of the sounds sometimes get messed up and many other technical issues that break the immersion. But bugs and glitches can be patched out most of the time, so these issues will probably disappear in the next couple of weeks. But there is more thing that I have to mention since I’m not sure that it can be fixed with a simple patch. The lip syncing in Wildlands is downright terrible. At first, I thought the timing of the lip movement was a little off, but that’s not the case. The mouths of characters just don’t move that well. It’s like looking at a fish trying to speak. I don’t know who at Ubisoft thought this looks good enough, but hopefully, they’ll try to fix this because it’s such a weird thing to see on screen.
Conclusion
Ghost Recon: Wildlands is not the game it could have been and suffers from a lot of the same mistakes that The Division has. While playing single player quickly gets repetitive, the co-op mode makes the game more enjoyable. If you’re looking for a new game to play with your friends and don’t mind some glitches and bugs, then you might want to check this game out. Just expect to do the same mission over and over again.
