REVIEW

Ghost Recon: Wildlands Review

by Will Fidler, March 18th, 2017

Only a few years ago, military shooters were the “in” thing. Tough men with big guns went to defend freedom, liberty, and the right to bear very large arms. Now open world games are the genre de jour. It was only a matter of time before someone took a stab at mashing the two together. It’s fitting then that Ubisoft, the father of the modern open-world template, have given us Ghost Recon: Wildlands.

“Wildlands” is a word that implies some crazy fun times. Explosions, quadbikes, maybe some Kenny Loggins on the radio to accompany a helicopter missile attack. Instead, Ghost Recon: Wildlands is more comfortable placing its bare bones mechanical palette and showing you the door.

You really do one thing in Wildlands – shoot. You shoot standing, you shoot crouching, you shoot prone, you shoot cars, you shoot helicopters, you shoot faces, you tell your friends or AI team mates to shoot for you, you shoot anything the open-world tells you to shoot. Thankfully, shooting has a satisfying weight to it. Hitting a target gives a bass heavy * THUD * and there is no shortage of targets to find around the absolutely massive locale of Bolivia. Dozens of rifles, shotguns, and the like are handed out like candy, with most being customizable with findable parts.

Attempting to separate itself from the usual open-world ilk, Wildlands wanted me to think tactically. Enemies aren’t dots on the radar until I spotted them through a scope or air-borne drone. Attacking a compound guns blazing is a recipe for disaster, so picking a few guys off with a suppressed sniper rifle before the big guns come out was always a winning formula. But Wildlands doesn’t want to actually be difficult, just methodical. Bullets kill quick, but the AI is dumb as mud and rarely put up resistance unless you stand in the open. Then it pulls back the map and tells you to do it again another hundred times.

Poring over my preferred tools of destruction and going about some murder is the one string Wildlands has in its bow. The slow unlock of different upgrades and abilities give a reason to explore the map, even if it’s for predominantly shallow reasons. New guns and parts offer an instant piece of feedback when it comes to turning men into paste. But skill points and medals feed into a largely unsatisfying tree of unlocks that rarely justify the time and resources needed to fill it out.

A reductionist interpretation of Ghost Recon: Wildlands would be: Drive to point A, shoot a few guys, find thing B, repeat. Unfortunately, it’s an accurate one. There is no mechanical hook that it hangs on the game on. Wildlands has no shortage of stuff to find and do, but it all comes down to shooting drug dealers in the face. It’s a flow so repetitive and grindy, that it almost becomes meditative; one that let me slip into a fugue state so I could commit mass genocide for the war on drugs.

It’s rather obnoxious then that Wildlands attempts to offload the burden of generating fun by constantly reminding you it’s better with friends. If the core gameplay loop can’t engage me by itself, how does adding three friends improve that? Doing anything with some buddies makes it fun, so shunting the responsibility away from the game and onto them to make the copy paste content enjoyable isn’t a good excuse for Wildlands sins.

The map is split into sections, with each area holding a major player in the Santa Blanca cartel, as well as a smattering of collectible fluff. Find enough intel, rough up enough dudes, and the big boss will come out of hiding for you to beat, shoot, kidnap, or shake down. Wildlands lets you tackle these kingpins in any order, and all come with well-produced videos about why their evil and what their part in the cartel is. The most fun I had playing Wildlands was finding out about the colourful and diverse group of criminals. These short clips go deep into how the cartel function under the mysterious El Sueno; a figure some comically large he looks tattooed Stretch Armstrong. It’s a shame then that all these details are all skippable and play no part in the barren main story. Instead offering quality dialogue like “let’s make like a tree and get the fuck outta here”.

Ghost Recon: Wildlands does very little to justify itself. After the murder of an undercover US agent by El Sueno, Uncla Sam sends in the Ghosts to Bolivia for a ‘revenge’ operation to dismantle the entire Santa Blanca group. You’re given carte blanche to murder, intimidate, blow up, or otherwise destroy an entire nation for revenge. Sure, Wildlands gives you some rather nasty people to murderfying, but it comes across very after-the-fact. More a bonus than the actual core. None of the main characters access an emotion other than vague annoyance, leaving a nasty, dry after-taste that thankfully evaporates away quickly rather than stick around to make things more awkward.

With the current wars on drugs being an incredibly violent, and arguably pointless, waste of life across South America, Ubisoft have hit the subject with the subtly of a 2-ton truck. Wildlands gives no insight, with nothing of interest to say except “killing Americans is bad, and so are drugs mmmmk”. It’s content with saying murder is the best and only option, which is an ugly opinion at best.

Other minor issues bog down things even more. Driving lacks any feel of weight or momentum, with vehicles pinging off rocks like they were made of rubber. Flying vehicles don’t fare better with helicopter controls that work on good intentions, rather than the imprecise controls. Bugs also appear frequently and often on PC. A 4gb patch has been released that helped somewhat, but even after that a lot of work is still required.

Ghost Recon: Wildlands commits the worse sin a game can commit – it’s boring. It does nothing new, it wants you to repeat the same simple activities for dozens of hours, and expects you and three friends to pony up £40+ each for the pleasure of taking down the Santa Blanca cartel.

The primary issue is Wildlands takes itself too straight. It never hands over any interesting tools of destruction for players to mess about with. It gives you a pile of guns, an open world, and expects the fun to ensue somewhere in between that rift. It’s average in almost every respect and lingers for far too long.