Ghost Recon Future Soldier

Game Info

The latest installment of Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon series, Future Soldier puts us in the shoes of the elite Ghost Recon squad, set in the very near future.  While this “near-future” setting translates mostly to gadgets, the nearly perfect shooting and great co-op lifts this game up to the high expectations set by Tom Clancy games (Politika notwithstanding).

After the main Ghost squad gets blown up, you take over to track down who blew them up, and eventually put down a rebellion in Russia.  The campaign takes players from South America to Africa to Russia, so there’s a decent variety of levels, even if they’re a bit generic.  Jungle stage!  Snow stage!  Shantytown!  Although the crowds in some of these stages are pretty well-done, it’s all been done before.  The plot is a bumbling mess, too.  In a game series that promotes realism, the idea that Russia will be taken over by a cabal calling themselves Raven’s Rock is just silly.  The Cold War has been over for nearly 30 years, can we please fight someone else?  There’s a ton of interesting political intrigue going on in the world right now that we don’t need to keep digging up the Russkies to scare us.  Bouncing all over the globe also creates weird rifts in the plot, and the cutscenes do nothing to help this fact out.  After one particularly chaotic battle, for example, your extraction helicopter gets blown up…  so you jump off a small bridge.  Like, a tiny bridge covering the gap over a creek.  The soldiers you were fighting look over the edge, and walk away.  End stage.  At another point, a huge deal is made of someone hacking your HUD and display stuff – and then it is immediately forgotten two streets later.  It’s a disjointed mess of a plot.  And since everyone is armored and usually semi-invisible, telling characters apart is impossible, confusing things even more.  Eventually, you’ll find out your character name is Kozak.  And he may have a beard.  And although the campaign can be co-op, the joining player doesn’t get a save file.  So keep that in mind if you’re planning on advancing.

Good thing the gameplay is otherwise so well-done.  The action is broken up very well, with stealth sections interspersed between the action parts.  These stealth bits can get frustrating, as in many of them setting off an alarm leads to a game over.  But patience, observation, and your gadgets help ease the pain.  Solving these stealth puzzles is akin to winning a challenging game of chess, and seeing the “CLEAR” sign pop up is extremely satisfying.  The action is good late Tom Clancy stuff – after he got through all the super-tactical games like the original Ghost Recon or the early Rainbow Six games.  It’s action-packed, with some very exciting set pieces.  The shooting is nearly perfect (aside from the shotguns), and some very neat weapons and ammo types spice up the gameplay.  The much-touted gunsmith feature basically a gimmick for tweaking your weapons, though.  Although it looks cool, the same could be accomplished just by adjusting sliders.

A big thrust of the game is the competitive multiplayer stuff, which has a vast, steep learning curve that requires a dedicated team.  Fans of the earlier Ghost Recon games will feel right at home with their clan or squad or whatever, since nearly none of the objectives can be completed single-handedly and not having cover is a death sentence.  There are some handy gimmicks here, such as tazing an opponent to get information from them, but without a dedicated group of players, the multiplayer is a nigh-impenetrable wall of getting shot in the spine by teams with microphones.  This is not a mode where pickup games are easy or winnable.

Guerrilla mode is also included, which is apparently how horde mode is spelled now.  If the game has multiplayer and guns, you can expect it to have horde mode.  You’ve played this before, so we won’t dwell on it.

Gimmick seems to play a big part of the graphical presentation.  While during gameplay, the game shows itself just fine, the overlaid HUD stuff and adaptive camo that everyone makes such a big deal of almost seems unnecessary.  I get where they’re coming from, but it seems like this needed to be in a few previous games before the developers got it 100%.  The overlay makes the game basically play itself, letting you tag enemies and having your teammates do all the wetwork.  And the adaptive camo almost feels like a lazy way to interject close-up stealth missions.  Instead of just admitting that the AI bad guys have poor detection skills, this camo goofiness masks that.  It also makes any customization irrelevant, since you’ll be playing most of the game as a semi-invisible guy in armor.  Although the presentation is just sloppy (watch the pre-mission cutscenes on top of maps for some laughs), the in-game action looks fine.  The sound design is pretty standard stuff.  Your guys will shout enemy locations, which is very helpful without a map present.  Otherwise, it’s par for the modern military shooter course here.  Rousing combat music, gun noises, bad guys.

Although I’ve been a little nitpicky, Ghost Recon Future Soldier is by no means a bad game.  It trys out some new things, and although they’re gimmicky, they are at least a bit different.  It’s a rock-solid third person shooter with good, relatively bug-free co-op and some great action pieces.  Although less tactical than the earlier Ghost Recon games, the mix of action and stealth is a good formula that I’m guessing we’ll see again.