Ghost Recon Future Soldier

I picked this game up during the current Ubisoft weekend sale going on at Steam for $4.99. I am a big fan of the GR franchise, in particular the older games. While I did like GRAW 1 & 2, those games (like all Tom Clancy games) began to move away from their roots and into more run and gun generic shooters that ultimately became forgotten beverage coasters.

The game was announced by Ubisoft in January 2009 and went through a three and a half year development period involving the Paris, Red Storm and Romania units for the console work and the Ukraine unit for the PC port. The game is clearly aimed at the console player, with many of the traditional tactical shooter mechanics having been removed in an effort to streamline gameplay.

I played through part of the first mission in which the goal was to extract a person of interest from a hostile environment, and quit before completing it in total disgust of the product. While I was really looking forward to this game and thought it would be a steal at $4.99, once I actually played it and saw what the franchise has morphed into I felt differently.

The Good

It’s a Ghost Recon game
I only wasted $4.99 on this
Interesting breach and room clearing slow motion system

The Bad

It’s a Ghost Recon game
Poor graphics for a 2012 release (they would have been awesome in 2002, maybe)
Linear game play where you are drug along Call of Duty style
Uninspired loading, menu and gear selection screens
Very predictable game events (I bet we are going to get hit by an RPG about now…)

The Ugly

The graphics, again: the textures are bland and look like they are from a game made a decade ago
Third-person viewpoint
Lacks any originality (I couldn’t be bothered to wait around to use Synch Shot or the adaptive camouflage system)

A mixture of good and bad textures all in the same cut scene

There is rappelling in the game which works basically the same as in Rainbow Six Vegas (I wonder why)

Manifest the dead…check. Punish the living…double check.

Horrible face/head texture implementation 1: this looks like 2002 work

Horrible face/head texture implementation 2: they just pasted the dudes face to this character

B- for effort: there are stats here (ala Raven Shield), however the browsing system seems completely uninspired (weapons floating in space?)

Cut Scene Ghost: I just took $4.99 from your back pocket! RangerX3X: Thief!!

Suffering from a bad case of consolitis.

Looks like a scene from the TV series Fringe.

The whole mission was running around streets (linear come with me style, no room to improvise and take a back alley to cut someone off) and shooting galleries such as this one. This is just lazy, sloppy work.

More laziness: the extraction helicopter gets waved off due to an RPG being fired at it. Does this happen in real life? Sure it does, but hell almost every combat shooter (first or third person) has already done this a thousand times over.

This is one of the very few positives from the game: breaching a door.

Entering the room slows the action down (kind of like in F.E.A.R.) where you can take out the enemies with ease.

RPG!! Rinse and repeat…

More Splinter Cell nonsense – let’s find a weapon crate in enemy territory containing American equipment that is needed to complete the mission! Why the hell I couldn’t just be told to take a silencer with me is the question I have for the developers.

And this is where I hung it up: the mission up to this point was run and gun through the streets full auto, now I have to use stealth and suppressed weapons so as not to alert the enemy. While this first mission is effectively a tutorial of sorts and it is obviously trying to cover all of the bases, this is actually poorly implemented for the mission at hand. They could have introduced this element in a later mission where stealth is required (if there is such a later mission).

The game requires a whopping 25 GB of hard disk space. That and the fact that it is a DirectX 11 game make the poor texture and graphics all the more puzzling. The game truly is uninspiring from what I have seen and is a letdown for the epic Tom Clancy franchise.

This is the way it should have been done.