Ghost Recon: Wildlands (BETA)

I must admit, I wasn’t particularly excited for the upcoming Ghost Recon: Wildlands. What little I’d seen of it suggested a somewhat mediocre mix of The Division and Far Cry. But I figured I’d give the beta a shot. Wildlands is an open world, solo or up to four player co-op third person shooter. It’s set in Bolivia and involves a crack team of American special operatives attempting to disrupt and dismantle a powerful drug cartel.

The map is split into multiple regions each with its own primary objective – taking out a key player in the cartel. In the beta, only one region was available, but it’s likely to serve as the core template upon which all regions are constructed.

In order to take out the cartel ‘boss’ of the region, you’ll first have to complete several smaller main missions that involve gathering intel or interrogating goons. These lead to a final mission in which you go after the boss. You’ll then gain access to new map regions and other key targets, each of which is ranked on a difficulty scale.

Each region also has multiple side missions involving a third rebel faction. There are also multiple collectibles to discover (which will be marked on your map if you access various forms of intel) and ‘supplies’ that you’ll need to unlock particular skills. So far, so very Far Cry in terms of structure.

Which you may consider to be a good or bad thing depending on your preference. There’s certainly a lot of content to keep you busy in Wildlands if you don’t care about the repetition. Because ultimately, once you’ve played a single region, I suspect you’ve played them all.

But though Wildlands may resemble Far Cry in terms of its open world structure, it must be said that (at least what I saw in the beta) it is certainly not as entertaining to explore. The region in the beta, though impressive in scale for a single region, was primarily dirt roads and small villages.

Traversing the map is rather dull, and there’s little reason to bother. There’s nothing interesting to see or do. This isn’t helped by the available vehicles, all of which handle rather poorly. Cars and bikes aren’t enjoyable to drive, and helicopters – though simple to control – feel slow and awkward to fly.

In terms of missions it’s about what you’d expect – go to place, shoot people. There’s little variety or elaboration in terms of objectives. And whilst I appreciate being able to approach missions in my own way by mixing combat and (rudimentary) stealth, nothing I played in the beta was at all interesting in terms of mission design. When compared to other Ubisoft titles such as The Division or Watch_Dogs 2, the missions in the Wildlands beta were rather basic and poorly constructed.

And it’s dull. I’d honestly had enough of the beta after only an hour of playing. I only stuck with it because I didn’t think it was fair to judge until I’d completed all of the main missions. So I did. But my opinion, unfortunately, didn’t change.

Technically, the beta was stable and the performance, though not perfect, was pretty good – unlike the recent For Honor beta. But I also couldn’t stop playing For Honor, despite the technical hiccups. After only a few short hours with the Wildlands beta, I’d had enough.

It’s not just the basic missions and the repetitive region structure that’s the problem, but the core gameplay. The Division suffered similar issues but it also had a very enjoyable and fluid third person cover/combat system. I expected Wildlands to be little more than a copy and paste variation of this system. I was wrong. And I really wish I wasn’t.

Compared to the The Division, or any recent third person cover based shooter, Wildlands feels dated and clunky. Movement animations are poor. Weapons feel weak and pack very little punch – even the grenade launchers are disappointing. The cover system is complete garbage and barely functions as your character ‘slides’ along objects. None of it feels good to play. For all the problems The Division had, at least it provided satisfying and fun combat.

Another thing I have to touch upon is the co-op feature. This game was clearly designed for co-op so if you’re thinking of playing solo – don’t. It wasn’t really a problem in The Division, but in that game you didn’t have three useless AI team mates following you around. Their AI is terrible. They ignore more enemies than they shoot and when they do shoot they can’t seem to hit anything.

They barely get involved in fights letting you do most of the work. The only useful thing they do is revive you when you go down, but that’s usually because they just stood by and watched as you were shot in the back. I hated them and tried to murder them multiple times without success.

Enemy AI isn’t much better. They take basic cover, throw the odd grenade, but they don’t coordinate or pose much of a threat unless they have the numbers. Stealth in the game is just ‘press B to crouch’ so I won’t bother saying more about that. Oh, and the story is pretty bad, at least from what I saw in the beta. It’s trying to be serious and failing miserably, the few attempts at injecting humour falling entirely flat.

Is there anything I like about it? The character customisation is okay, and I liked the weapon customisation as it was a nice step up from what was available in The Division. It looked nice, I guess. Yeah … that’s about it. I don’t think I’ll be picking it up at release, on sale or ever.