22/01/2018
WIth this extraordinarily large game about an elite soldier taking on Bolivian drug runners, is Ubisoft’s obsession with open worlds bordering on an addiction?
Dan Silver
Mon 13 Mar 2017 10.02 GMT Last modified on Tue 12 Dec 2017 10.32 GMT
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Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands
Fittingly for a game centred around co***ne production and the drug trade’s transformative effects on society, Ghost Recon Wildlands bears an uncanny resemblance to the deluge of double albums fuelled by the stuff in the 1970s: self-indulgent and overlong but with enough moments of quality buried within to just about excuse the whole endeavour.
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In truth, overlong is perhaps selling Wildlands short. This is an extraordinarily large game that will take months to complete. Ubisoft’s obsession with open worlds borders on an addiction itself – it’s surely only a mater of time before their rhythm action franchise Just Dance is relocated to a sandbox night club the size of the city of Sheffield - but they’ve really gone the extra mile here.
Or rather miles - the virtual Bolivia they’ve created is enormous, encompassing over a dozen different types of terrain and making GTA V’s Los Santos feel like a shanty town in comparison. It’s easy to become blase about expansive environments in this era of incredible open worlds but Wildlands still manages to take your breath away on a regular basis. Hotwiring a helicopter and heading out over its imperious peaks and seemingly endless salt flats proves a genuine joyride.
Up close, however, cracks start to show. Despite the painstaking attention to environmental design detail there’s still an unshakeable air of artificiality. Clutches of civilians go about their daily routines but they’re invariably outnumbered by brazenly armed bad guys and don’t seem unduly bothered by the warfare being waged around them, occasionally cowering in terror but more often just strolling on past. Instead of a living, breathing country, Wildlands feel like Westworld for the Guns & Ammo crowd.
Which, of course, is essentially what it is. A chance for players to live out their hardline Republican fantasies largely unencumbered by law or morality (killing civilians will theoretically cause missions to fail but the developers have built in plenty of leeway). In this near future nightmare scenario Bolivia has been transformed into a narco-state run by the all-powerful Santa Blanca cartel headed up by the heavily-tattooed jefe, El Sueno – a representation, by the way, that has sparked a real-world diplomatic incident between Bolivia and Ubisoft’s home country, France.
You take on the role of an elite US soldier sent in undercover and off the books to destabilise the drug runners by murdering them in their thousands. Ghost Recon at least does a good job of making light of this state-sponsored genocide. Each of the organisation’s two dozen underbosses has their own distinct dysfunctional personality and dedicated backstory, and there’s enough wit in the writing to elevate the stereotypical playboys and peasants-made-bad into if not three- then at least two-dimensional characters.
To give a sense of the scale of the challenge ahead, each buchon (the game practically fetishises Latino slang) rules their own zone of the map and players must discover pieces of intel to unlock the five story missions that will eventually reveal their target’s whereabouts. That equates to well over 100 campaign levels alone – and this being an Ubisoft game, there are also dozens of side missions to complete and collectibles to uncover, most of which increase the combat capabilities of the rebel forces fighting by your side.
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It’s a tall order, then, but the entire map is accessible from the start and you’re completely free to tackle the bosses in whichever order you see fit, a five point difficulty offering rough guidance as to the challenge you’ll face. And once you get the hang of things there’s a not unpleasant rhythm to the process of entering a new area, hunting for intel and then working your way towards the boss.
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The deliberately minimal missions largely fall into a handful of tropes – attack this, defend that, retrieve such and such, assassinate so and so – and tend to have a consistent cadence as well. You’ll invariably scoping out the target area with a drone, marking enemy positions from afar, before before silently and efficiently moving towards your objective like elite military operatives.
Or not. The emergent nature of Wildlands’ open world often contrives to make a mockery of your best laid plans of attack – and it’s this randomness that will most infuriate franchise veterans. In theory it’s possible to pull off the slick, synchronised squad warfare the series is known for but all too often a rogue military patrol or independent rebel cadre will stumble into your stakeout and suddenly all unscripted hell will break loose. During these moments the game becomes a riotous, explosive mash up of Mercenaries and Just Cause. It’s gunplay embraces arcade accessibility just enough to even the odds in a satisfying manner and if you embrace the chaos, it’s a blast – but Tom Clancy it ain’t. For many there just won’t be enough Ghost Recon in these Wildlands.
Playing online only serves to exacerbate the divide. As the incessant tooltip prompts to join public sessions and seamless drop in / drop out mechanic suggest, the game has been built with co-operation in mind. Wildlands’ robust sandbox systems positively demand human improvisation, and there’s as much fun to be had just from seeing how far they can be pushed as there is executing the perfect military operation. It makes for a largely enjoyable multiplayer military shooters – although not necessarily in a way purists would appreciate.
By comparison, solo play can feel a little soulless. Your AI squadmates might as well be actual ghosts, moving freely around the battlefield without alerting enemies and dispatching sentries remotely marked using the Sync Shot feature with unwaveringly perfect headshots. Ironically this nod to Ghost Recon’s tactical past actually undermines Wildlands’ freewheeling intentions, making you feel less like an armchair commander and more like a lazy cheat. Likewise, while your near-infallible fake friends can revive you once per mission to simulate co-op play, they’ll often autonomously complete the main objectives before doing so.
Much like the physics glitches that will clog up YouTube channels for months to come, such quirks are inevitable hazards of open world gaming. A more pressing concern is whether the lack of human spontaneity can sustain the marathon commitment and repetition needed to complete the game’s herculean campaign. With friends in tow, Wildlands could well prove to be The Wall of its genre; but much like a Roger Waters solo album, it loses some of the sparkle on its own.
