Ghost Recon: Wildlands Review

This is going to be a weird review, my experience with Ghost Recon Wildlands was basically, "this is kind of fun for the first few hours but the more I play it, the more I felt how painfully average it is". That's GR Wildlands in nutshell, it's not a game I consider good or bad just on the average on the side. Compared to the Ghost Recon games I have played liked Advanced Warfighter 2 and Future Solider, Wildlands is primarily carried by it's highly polished and amazing feeling controls and combat more so than the campaign experience being anything standout.

The story is basically nothing more than an excuse plot but some aspects of it I liked. For example, every time the player does a major blow to El Sueno's drug operation, there is a short optional video to watch where you see the villain reacting to what you did and considering I'm a fan of when games or any story have the villains react to the actions the hero does, this was something I enjoyed, it didn't have to be there, but it was nice that it was there at all.

The story itself is derivative stuff if you watch a lot of crime and political thrillers. I can't help but find characters like Karen Bowman and El Sueno to remind of characters in other stories and games. The former is voiced by Diana Burnwood's VA in the Hitman World of Assassination games and it was hard not to be reminded of her and Black Lagoon's Balalika. El Sueno's VA really feels like he was doing his best Vincent D'Onofrio Wilson Fisk impression.

Anyways enough of that, the gameplay of GR Wildlands at least when it comes gunplay is great. Damage animations when hitting enemy with gunfire just nails how powerful a comtemporary video game firearm should feel. The exaggerated blood splatter and the sound indicators upon hitting them just has a high level of polish that I like to see in any game.

The easy difficulty is also very accomadating for people who don't want to engage with the coop, exploring the open world or needing to unlock more skills in the skill tree to be efficient at the game since if it wasn't, I would've dropped the game a few hours in.

The controls on console feel just as if not more refined than Future Solider's, it's pretty much the same except no Splinter Cell Conviction and Blacklist snap cover system. Your character does feel at the very least nimble enough to climb up some walls and chest high walls and it's nice to be able to scale down cliffsides without the fear of the game killing me I'm not allowed to take the slightest bit of fall damage. The easy difficulty also makes enemy awareness accomadating to make stealth possible all though I would never call the stealth as good in an open world setting like Metal Gear Solid 5's since despite having power generators and being able to toggle night vision, darkness does not not seem to effect visiblity. 

A big positive for the game is that you can still extract targets at safe houses even when helicoptors and enemies are shooting you, it might be unimmersive but I'm thankful this is here at all since it would add extra frustration.

Few other points to the game's favor is that missions are short and generally have checkpoints in them when they go on for slightly longer, there's lots of fast travel points to cut down on some tedious travel time and finally, you do not need to take out all 4 Cartel Bosses to beat the game, temmate AI is also fine and rarely got in the way and always helped when I was down which is nice, you just need to takedown 2 which is great since if the game went on any longer I would just get more and more annoyed by it. You do need to takedown all 4 for the "true ending" but why even go for that when the story is an excuse plot to begin with. On top of this, the story, final mission and default ending changes very little no matter which order you kill the cartel bosses.

I might sound positive but all these things I listed is basically me saying, "I'm just happy that the game I spent 20 hours playing and got to the end of wasn't terrible and was able to beat at all."

One big issue is the big the open world is, there are fast travel points but you will still need to do lots of driving. I did beat Jak 2 so I never found Wildlands' driving as awful as some pointed out but the amount of driving and empty space there can make the stretches of downtime is very boring.

The load times on PS5 are also really long which makes me want to play on easy that much more so I can lower the amount of times seeing the load screen upon death and lower the repeat runbacks to the outposts. 

The biggest issue is that missions are one note. Most of them last about less than 10 minutes and it revolves around "destroy x, kindnap y, kill z, locate f, interrogate c, find documents, hack into this, defend this, attack this vehicle, talk to this guy, sneak into here". If you played the first 5 hours of Wildlands, you already played much of the game. If the game was 10 hours, I'd be much forgiving as a whole but it takes a while just to takedown the first Cartel boss and you've seen everything. 

Overall, GR Wildlands is a game I can't say I outright dislike but at the same time, I can't say it rises above being average.