Okay, first of all let’s go back a couple of years… when Ubisoft released Ghost Recon Wildlands, which in my opinion was just as good as all of its hype before its actual release. It was perfect, although a little system resource intensive, which can be forgiven as later patching made it even better and more stable. The game was well built and incorporated co-op into the game. It really felt like you were dropped into a drug cartel controlled country and had to fight your way to dismantle the cartel. As you can tell, I really enjoyed that game.

 

 

As the direct sequel to Ghost Recon Wildlands, you will be thrown into yet another astounding open world.

 

As the leader of the Ghost Recon team, you will again play under the callsign “Nomad” and your mission is to find out why the fictional island of Aurora, near New Zealand. You went down after a navy cargo-ship was destroyed.

 

After your character appearance is setup your chopper gets shot down and you are introduced to the new survival mechanics and have to treat your wounds. After that you realize: You are alone. No AI teammates and your only way of backup are some synch shot drones you can unlock via a skill tree or in co-op. For this Ubisoft gave us a class system containing four classes:

The Medic, Panther, Assault and Sniper. The Panther is all about stealth, whereas the other classes are self explanatory.

 

Talking about being alone, at least this is what Ubisoft tries to make us believe but once you reach the player hub you can watch dozens of other players jumping around with their fancy airsoft skull masks. After completing the introduction conversations with some NPCs and accepting a couple of missions you are free to explore. The two major factions you will find are the Sentinel, some PMCs that are from the difficulty comparable to the narcos of Breakpoint’s prequel and the Wolves highly trained elite soldiers.

 

Then there are the drones: flying drones as well as ground moving drones. And on top of that there are the behemoths: Giant drones with a wide arsenal of weapons you can encounter in the world and require a gear level.

 

As for gameplay, it feels almost as if they had a brilliant idea with the game… up until a suit decided that they needed to push a game to market to piggy back off of the previous game’s success and cash in as much as possible by pushing developers and their teams to get the game ready to launch, despite being half built.

 

Even after a year (initially released July 2019), one would expect that the game and its combat mechanics would have been fixed… Clearly this has not been done and after all this time the game still feels clunky and difficult to play as a third person shooter.

 

Let me elaborate a little more, I played the game on a PlayStation 4 Pro. Reason why I mention this is that usually you would think that the quality of the in-game would look, feel and perform a little better as it usually does with other games. Again this is not the case, but we will write this off to the current Gen console age and lack of resources.

 

This still does not excuse the really bad combat camera angles especially in small spaces like in a building. While trying to take down some of your enemies. Even while trying to shoot them the controller mechanics feels like its something from the early 2000s. Nothing is smooth, nothing is consistent in the game. This amounts to serious frustration and you’ll need to turn the game down to easiest mode just to be able to clear a mission. As a guess, I would hope that the game would handle better with a keyboard and mouse. Even with this said, it is not what you would expect from the company that brought us games like Assassin’s Creed.

 

 

In summary:

Pros:

Good story line

 

Cons:

Camera problems

Constant in-game videos