Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Wildlands Review
Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Wildlands Review
Of all the publishers out there, it’s Ubisoft that has most affectionately embraced the open world. Costly and time-intensive to create, open-world games are a risky proposition, even for a company the size of Ubisoft. That it has transformed an existing and largely well-received franchise into an open-world game is riskier still.
But Ubisoft has, for better or worse, crafted something of a template for the genre with games like Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, and Watch Dogs, into which slots Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands. The result is a truly enormous and frequently beautiful game, but one that often feels like a disorganised muddle of things to do. It lacks a coherent narrative thread to pull you through its cookie-cutter co-op content, and it regularly condones some poisonous ideas through lazy writing.
As an unnamed member of an ultracapable quad-man (or woman) squad, you’re tasked with creating your own persistent online “Ghost” (read: character) from a huge list of options before heading to Bolivia. Wildlands’ rendition of the country is a vast sprawl of all kinds of different landscapes. There are mountainous peaks that offer great sniping opportunities but little cover, desert flats that offer neither cover nor the elevation for a tactical advantage, and tundra and verdant vegetation, which provide ample space to manoeuvre unseen. There are a multitude of different outposts, too, both militarised and civilian, which give you urban spaces to navigate.
Your reason for being in Bolivia is explained in the first couple of minutes: the country has been turned into a narco state by the merciless Santa Blanca Cartel, which is headed up by the ludicrously tattooed top dog, El Sueno. Your job as the Ghosts is to systematically destabilise the cartel’s presence in the nation, going up against the corrupt private military forces that police Bolivia. The plan for doing so is painfully familiar: repeat similar if not identical missions––killing goons, tagging drug supplies, interrogating lieutenants, and tailing convoys––with the aim of taking out the gang’s low- and mid-level leaders, before slowly working your way up to the big boss himself.
While the reasons for your arrival in Bolivia might be clear, the justifications for your actions are absolutely not. Wildlands is, on its surface, a standard action game set in a tropical South American nation, but its blasé acceptance of American interventionism—as well as its careless casting of the Ghosts as “good guys”—creates an unpleasant edge to the story it tries to tell. Chances are you won’t like the Ghosts themselves, and nor should you: they’re a bad bunch of grossly immoral dickheads doing morally questionable things in the name of the “greater good.” Ripped straight from the W. Bush Playbook of 2003, both the Ghosts and their handler, a woman called Bowman, are just nasty.
While it’s unpleasant in one way, it can also be just plain stupid in others. One of the early cartel bosses you come up against is a classic example of Ubisoft overwriting its characters to the point of eye-rolling absurdity. This ruthless drug lord and murderer—who you’re told is one of the most brutal killers in Bolivia—also snorts the ashes of his dead father to absorb the power of the dead. While it’s clearly meant to embellish the cartel culture—an attempt to make you understand it, perhaps even respect it—this moment actually just comes off like Ubisoft attempting to make this guy seem half bad, half cool, and failing abysmally in the process.
For that reason, Wildlands is best played ignoring the story, characters, and politics entirely. Treated simply as a piece of bone-headed entertainment where you can shoot guys with different guns, the game can be an enjoyable co-op experience for tactical gun slinging. Regardless, it’s still clear that Ubisoft has pushed out a game that’s full of bugs, while also continuing its own crime of scattering endless collectibles across the game world. This, in some regard, is understandable—Wildlands has been designed so that up to four people can play in the same squad, and there’s clearly a need to pack tons of stuff to do—but the sheer abundance of the cookie-cutter content means that you may tire out way before you put a bullet in El Sueno’s skull.
GAME DETAILS
Developer: Ubisoft Paris
Publisher: Ubisoft
Platform: PC, PS4, Xbox One (PS4 reviewed)
Rating: M for Mature
Release Date: March 7, 2017
Price: Standard Edition: £42, $59
Links: Amazon (UK) | Amazon (US) |Official website
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