Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Breakpoint (2019)

This game is such a mess in places I love it. I don't think the developers intended for it to be played as a comedy but that's definitely how me and my friend treated Wildlands and we've taken the same approach here. Just hoping we find some bot team mates to join us who shout "shit balls" as we tumble down mountains in quad bikes.

Can imagine it's pretty frustrating or eye-roll inducing if you're playing this as a singleplayer experience, or if you're trying to take it seriously with a team, but if you enjoy a good giggle and watching certain mechanics break then this is it.

Part of me wishes we had more janky messes like this because the core gameplay functions most of the time but you're left with a really hilarious presentation and execution. At the same time though I guess it's not the best thing to wish for more janky messes to be released. We're both having a whale of a time though.

I know this isn’t a revolutionary statement, but UbiSoft’s open world games are starting to blend all together. Whether Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, The Division, or Ghost Recon they all use the same style of menus. They share a lot of gameplay mechanics and general game designs. The only thing that differentiates them is if your character has a gun or a sword. That being said, they do it competently. I still enjoy the UbiSoft open-world, but now I have to be in a mood for it. Sometimes the side missions of just wandering around capturing outposts is what I need, other times it’s pure tedium.

I started Ghost Recon Breakpoint ready to go on a tactical military adventure, but ended up stopping halfway through because of the open world grind, after a few months I finally came back to finish it. I think the biggest sin this game makes is having a boring story, which drags down the rest of the open world experience. Sure, Wildlands wasn’t a groundbreaking story, but it kept things moving along and the country of Bolivia gave you interesting landscapes dotted with little villages. From moment one you had your chart of drug cartel lieutenants you had to investigate and track down. Each had a little backstory that gave them some flavor. Breakpoint feels like it’s always in Act 1. Sure, things happen, but it all still felt like build up to me. You rescue people, take down factories, eliminate big baddies, but it never feels like the story is properly escalating. I guess if I wanted to give them credit they were trying to keep the story grounded in a sort “real spec op guys aren’t flashy” kind of way. Though that wouldn’t make sense when the main enemy is a bunch of crazy future drones.

The setting of this game had possibility. You are on a mission in a remote island an eccentric tech billionaire is turning into a futuristic utopia, unfortunately the PMC he hired to police the island has taken over and are using the future tech to build war robots. By the time you get there all the towns have been abandoned, so you never see any civilians like in Wildlands. The art style of the tech company and its towns is, if not unique, at least noticeable, lots of white walls and glass windows. It sticks out from the island’s natural jungles. The island of Aurora is a nice mix of jungles, snowy mountains, and grasslands. It’s still not as diverse as Bolivia. Again, no matter how crummy some of their other game aspects are, UbiSoft still delivers on beautiful looking worlds.

This game continues the story of Nomad, who the male version got a new voice actor that I have mixed feelings on. His voice is much deeper and raspier, it sounds like he’s trying too hard to be a gruff military guy, but I got used to it eventually. His team is sent to investigate an American freighter that went missing near the island. His helicopter goes down and his team is killed by our main baddies, the Wolves, sort of the Reverse Flash to Ghost Recon. Though by the time I got the game they added back in the option to have teammates. The Wolves are the game’s lieutenants, and they are boring. We get no real development on any of them, they just show up later in the game at random points and they all look like a bunch of “tacti-cool” douches. The lead wolf, Walker, is kinda neat. He gets all the development and his voice actor leans into the role and sells it. He was a fun bad guy & the relationship between him and Nomad makes up the one vaguely interesting plot point.

There’s also the CEO of the tech company, Jace Skell, who is, again, an eccentric tech type. He ends up being a good guy helping the Ghosts hack the drones and locate Walker, but I honestly figured his character would be a turncoat. It’s predictable, but that’s how those characters go. Instead he’s played off as “Oh, I didn’t know what was happening, I’m just a poor hapless billionaire.” Very dull. There’s also a group of island natives living like survivalists during this PMC uprising, and an even more ragtag group of islanders trying to take back their island, they aren’t anything to write home about as there's little time spent on developing their characters beyond the bland archetype.

The missions in this game are pretty standard for open world games. It’s a lot of “go here, grab this” or “sneak in here and save this person”. The bland objectives do allow you freedom in how you approach a location. You can be sneaky sniper or roll up in an APC. There are a few more scripted missions with turret or defense sections. The gameplay is what makes this game even worth playing. It’s got a good mix of casual military shooter and tactical shooter. The AI isn’t smart enough to pull off advanced tactics, but you can use tricks like rolling in mud to disguise yourself and it works, especially against helicopters. You still don’t have as much control over your squad mates as I’d like. They are little more than extra targets to draw the enemy’s fire from you. Shooting feels good, I always hit where I was aiming and most misses were on my lack of skill not game jank. If you take a major injury you have to stop and patch yourself up with a bandage, ala MGS3. You can call in vehicles from campsites, but given the island’s rocky terrain, helicopters are the only practical way to get around.

You can customize the crap out of this game which I do like. You can decide what shows up on your HUD, how realistic gun magazines work, whether you want things to be more RPGish with levels and ranks, or more realistic where who has the bigger number isn’t what matters. You can tweak how taxing the survival meters are. You can outfit your weapons in all the ways you expect; scopes, paints, rail mounts, etc. There’s plenty of ways to customize Nomad and his teammates, ranging from undercover civilian looks to decked out spec op uniforms, and I don’t think near as many outfit pieces were locked behind paid add-on bundles as in Wildlands.

There’s also an online multiplayer component to Breakpoint. I played a few rounds of 4v4 with a squad of friends, and it was fun. Of course, everything is fun with friends, but the slower, tactical pace of Ghosts vs a CoD or Battlefield worked better for my playstyle. I’m not a good twitch shooter. Stalking through the brush, covering each other’s back, using comms to communicate. It was a fun time and we usually won our rounds, unless we came upon a squad of friends that were better than us. I wouldn’t say Breakpoint is worth it just for the multiplayer like some other shooters are, but it’s for sure a fun bonus.

All in all, this game fell victim to the boredom that can creep into UbiSoft open-world games. Wildlands wasn’t a mile a minute thrill either, but Breakpoint just doesn’t bring anything new or interesting to the table, or if it did, it didn’t capitalize on it. Still there’s solid gameplay if you want a military game to just faff around in. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn this was one of those rushed out, half-done sequels that was less about telling Nomad’s ongoing story & more about continuing a Ghost Recon revenue stream.

Spoilerless review, for your sweet eyes only

From the start this sounded like a good idea, take the first game and fix all the lacking points. You can't speak of breakpoint without speaking about wildlands, the first opus.

The thing is Ubisoft, in Wildlands, wanted to propose a new gaming experience, between the classic openworldshooteraction game and a more realistic one like arma with some ghost recon here and there. But, even if the idea is good, this is ubisoft, so they went alf speed on every feature. Features which were fixed by long years of update and hotfixe. The developpers clearly never leaved this game in spite of the more than average reviews of this one. A community quickly formed around Wildlands, the new ear of ghost recon was born and the open approach permited by the game was something a lot of people wanted to see.

So Breakpoint was supposed to be the pinacle of this. Like the division 2 is more like the division 1.5, the first one but fixed. This is were ubisoft went full retard, and you know what they say.

What the freaking fuck happened here, nobody knows. They marketed the game as a survivalist hardcore experience, the kind of thing the wildlands fans were begging for. Showing bullet wounds being patched, the player being chased across a beautifull island by some (maybe too much) badass headhunters. This was the blink of a game were a single shot could kill you and you had to really invest into tactics to be effective. A marvel of hype.

And... The private alpha went out... And nothing, I MEAN NOTHING was as promised. They did to breakpoint what worked well with their other games, light RPG. A feature so poor players couldn't really understand what was going on. What the fuck was the gun score meaning ? Could you really NOT kill someone because you grinded not enough, IN A GHOST RECON GAME ? This was it, no need to go further. Breakpoint had become a bad division clone no amount of open world could fix.

Then, a year or so later, they issued a long waited update, the immersive mode arrived. The game, if it wasn't perfect at all, became at least playable for fans of the first one. No more light rpg bullshit but a fully configurable experience. On this one they really did a good job, even if some things were buggy, all players could play together reagardless the mode they were playing in (hardcore or gear score). So from here a quick review a what is happening in this game. It is indeed, with this mode, an upgrade of the first one. Sadly AI still are dumb as fuck but drones bring a new kind of gameplay to the game. You have to strike hard and fast or you'll be vaporised in seconds, a real feeling of fear and danger can establish itself when you are pplunged in the mud, waiting for a drone to pass just a meter in front of you. Even if the survivalist experience is 10% of what It should be, at least it is there and no game propose a alternative to it. For the story, it is mostly okay. Some technological bullshit fixes the plotholes but in the new generation of ghost games story is not the main point. Sides quest were drastically improved, with the investigation system ubisoft made a big step in the right direction, even fedex quests can be fun, learning the story of peoples and the island. Characters, in spite of a lot of effort put into them don't really have a place into my hearth. Sadly, AI partners are now gone, they were probably too dumb to live and in a world where stealth is your first priority AI + drones were probably a bad mix.

There is a lot more to say, but with the game going as low as 3€ you can invest time and money in it when there is a discount on the store, still not worth 60€ of your hard earned money.

Final word time it is : it's okay, they could have done it better but hey, there is no other game like it /20

It seems like the Ghost Recon franchise is no longer a 'tactical' shooter anymore. It started with Wildlands, but with the new focus on loot and gear it seems like there's no more interest in making a game where the military strategy is more important than the 'level' of the weapons.

I wrote an article (in spanish) about how Ghost Recon lost its identity.