2.5/5 ★ – peacebrendanp's review of Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon® Wildlands.

This was my first Ubisoft game I have played in several years. The first ten-hours were pretty interesting, the following 20-hours were tedious, bloated, and annoying. This is a PS3-era game, in terms of design, gameplay, and story. It has PS4-era graphics, but even then, the animations and everything else feel from a previous era. Even despite that, there could be elements that can be overlooked, but the game just gets in it's own way too much. The actual mission structure is interesting on paper: you have to take out under-bosses of a cartel to get to the leader. However, you need to take out buchons to reach an underboss. There are five missions for every buchon, and 5 buchons for every underboss. You must take out two underbosses before attempting to reach the final leader of the cartel. After 32-hours of gameplay, I had not even reached one underboss. There are many sins this game commits, and this is one of them. The game is terribly bloated and repetitive. The next sin, is the fail-conditions of missions. They are unclear, almost never communicated, and will result in you failing missions a number of times. The open-world makes you think there may be different ways to attempt missions, but in reality, you often will find yourself just trying to blunt-force your way through them, due to how inconsistent the game is. Enemy detection? Inconsistent and often unfair. Upgrades? Uninteresting. Enemy outposts? One-dimensional and often only offer a couple of ways to enter the base. Fences and walls get in the way, and there are often few ways to actually enter a base. When detection starts to become an issue, it's pretty difficult to disappear again. Your companions? Holy shit. They will get detected. You will not have control over their detection. And, it will result in mission failure a number of times. Enemy AI is one-dimensional, basic, and annoying. The game doesn't feel dynamic or interesting enough to warrant the amount of hours it asks of you. I wanted to play a tactical-shooter, so I was going to play Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, but I saw a lot of folks recommending this entry. Some, even saying this game was better. I will be playing Ghost Recon: Breakpoint next, and I can only hope that those people are wrong. Ghost Recon: Wildlands was a mess for me. A mess riddled with some really janky gameplay, and a world that felt really one-note in terms of it's enemy encampments and events (also the game is very quiet at times, I wish there were more music to score the gameplay). Speaking-of, it's enemy encampments felt so stale. Normally in Ubisoft games, this is an area they get somewhat right. I would normally expect to be able to take out encampments to lessen the presence of the enemy, but that doesn't seem to be a present feature in the game. At least, not from what I can tell. I liked the aspect of securing supplies to help support the rebel-cause, and it's an interesting idea to have those supplies feed into the leveling system, but it just ended up feeling really arduous to even try and level at that point. The one area that was super well-done was the environments. While the game is far from the prettiest I have played, the environments are all diverse and varied. It's actually pretty incredible what was achieved for the time this game came out. However, it ends there. I just wish the environments were a bit more dynamic than what they are here. Anyways, I don't know what else to say. Customization is cool, but many options are locked behind the store. The gameplay feels flat, especially with all the different guns feeling the same. The game is bloated, and asks too much of the player. The story is fine, but execution feels messy, with cutscenes being optional de-briefs that are sprinkled throughout the game. I just don't see the hype here. The core-ideas here are solid, just the actual implementation is terrible. I played on all difficulties (primarily on the hardest and regular difficulties), and there is just something not right with how this game is balanced. I looked up the endings to the main-line story, Operation: Oracle, and the Fallen Ghosts DLC, and I must say, all endings do not warrant a full playthrough, or the number of hours that are demanded to achieve them. Steam Deck note: I played this game for about 4-hours on Steam Deck. This is an okay experience on the Steam Deck, and should be mostly playable. It took some configuration of controls to get this to operate how it should. Anyways, 32-hours was too much to sink into this one, but at least I saw what the game was about. Hopefully Ghost Recon: Breakpoint offers a more dynamic gameplay experience. Console Played On: PC (Steam) / Steam Deck (SteamOS) Game Played: 01/2025 - 02/2025 Review Written and Published: 02/13/2025