Here is a timeline of my experience of Ghost Recon: Wild Lands. 5 minutes in: This is a long cut scene, this villain who won't stop talking must surely be a prominent character. 10 minutes in: Oh, that's a lot of product placement guns I've been awarded by the Ubisoft store, I hope I can quickly unlock normal guns to try them out. 30 minutes in: Why these vehicles are kind of annoying to drive, maybe I won't have to do that so often. 60 minutes in: Huh, clearing out that town of bad guys felt a bit like the last four towns I cleared out. I expect they will do something to jazz it up before it gets boring. 180 minutes in: Why, I only had to repeat the same task a dozen times to kill the first mini-boss. I imagine they will do something different for the next 27 bosses listed. 300 minutes in: Oh dear.
Wild Lands is a virtual exhibit of every negative aspect of Ubisoft games. It's a soulless, repetitive, sprawling, time consuming experience that feels like nothing but busy work. You are almost immediately presented with a beautiful landscape, and your only means of interacting with it are to traverse outposts to shoot barking enemies. When you aren't shooting people, you are doing repetitive tasks that largely serve to make more and more icons appear on your map, so that you can go to those icons and watch the same animation play out when you open the box, or put a tag on some supplies. All the game needed was flower picking to finish it off.
The open world formula does nothing to benefit the Tom Clancy squad shooter format. These games are usually about pimping out a vast arsenal of guns, but this game forces you to collect hundreds of gun bits from all across its mock up map of Bolivia, wasting your time just to unlock even the puny beginner pistols. Tom Clancy games are also usually about tense firefights and close quarter squad battles. This is absent in this game, where the optimal course of action is to stay 250 meters back with a rifle and snipe off mooks armed with uzis and sweaty vests. Hundreds of times.
With so much tedium, the Tom Clancy politics are all the more apparent. In this game, the baddies are a cartoon version of Latin American drug cartels, and the entire country of Bolivia is a criminal empire that worships Santa Muerta and every villain is named "el [Spanish noun]". You the player are a secret squad of manly/cool Americans given carte blanche to massacre them. Killing enough civilians will eventually fail the mission, but your squad offer only a mild childing when you cut them down in the crossfire. There is absolutely no introspection on US interventionism or the horrors of conflict, just the steadfast assumption that you are doing good because there are evil baddies that make drugs. This is someone's power fantasy about getting to splat foreigners which turns out to be as boring as it is grotesque.
Ubisoft on Autopilot
Here is a timeline of my experience of Ghost Recon: Wild Lands. 5 minutes in: This is a long cut scene, this villain who won't stop talking must surely be a prominent character. 10 minutes in: Oh, that's a lot of product placement guns I've been awarded by the Ubisoft store, I hope I can quickly unlock normal guns to try them out. 30 minutes in: Why these vehicles are kind of annoying to drive, maybe I won't have to do that so often. 60 minutes in: Huh, clearing out that town of bad guys felt a bit like the last four towns I cleared out. I expect they will do something to jazz it up before it gets boring. 180 minutes in: Why, I only had to repeat the same task a dozen times to kill the first mini-boss. I imagine they will do something different for the next 27 bosses listed. 300 minutes in: Oh dear.
Wild Lands is a virtual exhibit of every negative aspect of Ubisoft games. It's a soulless, repetitive, sprawling, time consuming experience that feels like nothing but busy work. You are almost immediately presented with a beautiful landscape, and your only means of interacting with it are to traverse outposts to shoot barking enemies. When you aren't shooting people, you are doing repetitive tasks that largely serve to make more and more icons appear on your map, so that you can go to those icons and watch the same animation play out when you open the box, or put a tag on some supplies. All the game needed was flower picking to finish it off.
The open world formula does nothing to benefit the Tom Clancy squad shooter format. These games are usually about pimping out a vast arsenal of guns, but this game forces you to collect hundreds of gun bits from all across its mock up map of Bolivia, wasting your time just to unlock even the puny beginner pistols. Tom Clancy games are also usually about tense firefights and close quarter squad battles. This is absent in this game, where the optimal course of action is to stay 250 meters back with a rifle and snipe off mooks armed with uzis and sweaty vests. Hundreds of times.
With so much tedium, the Tom Clancy politics are all the more apparent. In this game, the baddies are a cartoon version of Latin American drug cartels, and the entire country of Bolivia is a criminal empire that worships Santa Muerta and every villain is named "el [Spanish noun]". You the player are a secret squad of manly/cool Americans given carte blanche to massacre them. Killing enough civilians will eventually fail the mission, but your squad offer only a mild childing when you cut them down in the crossfire. There is absolutely no introspection on US interventionism or the horrors of conflict, just the steadfast assumption that you are doing good because there are evil baddies that make drugs. This is someone's power fantasy about getting to splat foreigners which turns out to be as boring as it is grotesque.