Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands, a massive open world game has been released for PC, PS4, Xbox One. I got my hands on PC version first. So, Is the Ghost Recon Wildlands open world game to which we all have been looking forward to? Does it qualify as an absolute worthwhile experience?
Ghost Recon Wildlands story is set in Bolivia where your mission is to take down Santa Blanca, a terrorist group and a drug cartel piece by piece. Story is explained to you through set of videos as you explore more territories in this massive open world map. Overall it's about reaching to the head of Santa Blanca, that is an evil charismatic El Sueño and knocking him down for good. In many ways It's a picture of real world drug mafia and solving it in the style of a Ghost Recon game.
It's an operation name Kingslayer, a joint mission of CIA, DEA and JSOC. Your team consist of 4 members including you, known as "Ghost". You can either choose to play with AI members or you can get along with other online players in 4 player co-op mode.
Gameplay:
Ghost Recon Wildlands gives you a true co-op mode experience. When playing in co-op mode you can join other players on-going game sessions or invite them to yours. When playing with AI members you can command them according to your own game plan, which makes it too easy as well, i completed 3 zones of complete map in just few hours by simply doing sync attacks, where you can put marker on enemy AI targets and ask your team to shoot them down at once. No matter the level of enemy AI, whether it's pawn or major character you can kill them all with one right shot. Firefights become intense when you get detected by enemies during mission and they call for reinforcements.
Game has lot of side missions through which you can unlock skill points, Weapon Accessories and upgrade your gears etc. For example you can upgrade skills for your drone, squad and even the resistance group who is assisting you during missions. You can get skills like usage of parachute while jumping from helicopter or chopper planes. Driving vehicles such as car, bike, boat, helicopter, chopper planes are quite easy but I found car's driving not realistic enough, it feels like a boat driving. Sometimes to reach early to desired location if you cheat your way through hills and woods it doesn't damages your car as it should. Once you unlock zones on your map, you can fast travel to safe houses and to locations you have already discovered.
Ghost Recon Wildlands has several types of Story missions such as killing the enemy target, sometimes defending the area, acquiring resources, or chasing down the target. You can unlock story missions by acquiring Major Intel assets, scattered around various locations on your map. There is lot of similarities in overall setup of every Story mission, you may feel repetitive of many tasks among various missions. It has a huge map, but due to repetitiveness of gameplay elements it feels that the huge map size is quite unnecessary. No doubt that story missions give you more than 100 hours of gameplay and at times it does challenge you to complete the task but not differently enough.
Overall I liked the gameplay elements like using drones, AI partners and Co-op mode but i didn't like the way every mission's plot had similarities between them. In Co-Op you'll spend countless hours without even realizing. It's like Ghost Recon Wildlands is designed to be fully enjoyed in Co-Op mode only.
Graphics:
It feels like due to massive open world plot, visuals have been compromised for optimum performance. I played it on PC and graphics were not up to the mark. I was targeting solid 1080p only but even in Very High graphics preset the texture quality was not up to the mark. It also has few bugs and glitches and I was waiting for Day-one patch to resolve all of these issues, But it didn't eliminate all of them. On PC, Game still has some graphic issues to fix. I'm hoping Ghost Recon Wildlands performance on PC will improve with future patches.
Verdict:
Overall Ghost Recon Wildlands is something new to begin with but not entertaining enough to continue with for longer time unless you have a fun team for Co-Op. With some more dynamic gameplay elements it could have been a better experience. Ghost Recon Wildlands is a solid shooter game with good story plot but not necessarily a good open world game. Still, Ghost Recon Wildlands is one of the best co-op mode games out there.
Rating: 7/10
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