The following preview of Ghost Recon Wildlands is based on an event hosted by Ubisoft that PlayStation Universe was invited to.
I’ve been staring at the screen for about 20 minutes wondering how the hell am I supposed to write about Ghost Recon: Wildlands after playing it for four hours yet only covering less than one percent of its overall content. Overall, Ubisoft’s latest shooter and addition to the Ghost Recon series features 21 different zones, which initially doesn’t seem like much, until you discover their sheer size. To give you some perspective; There were 41 zones in World of Warcraft when the title first launched, however the zones in Wildlands are easily 3-5 times larger than of those in WoW.
Some of the questions I was asked before going to this event were: “how are the missions played compared to a title like The Division?” and “how is the enemy and Ghost AI?” so let’s get that covered.
The missions are nothing like The Division. You do start the game in a specific spot in Bolivia but you can take a completely different approach if that’s what you prefer. If you decide that you want to start playing in a different area then you can hop in a car, drive there, and start playing. Doing that will not hinder anything especially if you decide later you want to play with a friend as most, if not all, the missions are repeatable.
When it comes to completing missions, you will need to have some sort of plan. You can’t go into an enemy compound guns blazing or you will die. I don’t know how many times I surveyed an area and thought “Oh, there are only four enemies, I’ll be fine” only to be manhandled.
Which brings us to the AI. The enemies are fairly smart and will occasionally run from cover to cover while shooting at you. Don’t take it lightly. Their aim is pretty decent (I played on normal mode) and a few bullets is all it takes to bring you down. This could be my own perception, but they also seemed to bait me. One guy would be alone and when I would get up to kill him, all of a sudden there are 3 others waiting for me.
Unfortunately, I can’t say the same about the Ghosts (your teammates) AI. They did not seem to help me much at all and it felt like I was the only one taking down cartel members. There were a few times I saw them running in place doing absolutely nothing which made solo-play a bit frustrating at times. However, I marked that as just a bug that would hopefully be resolved before launch.
This is where co-op play shines. Replacing your Ghosts with actual players and going on missions is f**king fun. Especially driving a car full speed and launching them off a cliff while you eject out. In all seriousness, co-op is what makes Ghost Recon: Wildlands a must-buy in my opinion. Being able to group with three of your buddies and come up with a plan of attack makes missions a breeze. Add that along with everyone in your group having different guns and options set, and you can take down the hardest of missions pretty easily.
That doesn’t mean that solo-play can’t be fun either. As I mentioned earlier, I only played a very very small portion of Wildlands and I first jumped into the game playing by myself where I was still getting the controls down.
All in all, if you enjoy games that you can’t complete in a week or like hooking up with friends to shoot some baddies then Ghost Recon Wildlands is shaping up to be a very decent title. I played a pretty polished game last week and it’s only going to be more clean when it launches on March 7, 2017.