Ubisoft's Ghost Recon series has been around since 2001 with the original on the PC. I was first introduced to the series when it shifted from first person to third person view with 2006's Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter on the 360. I last played that game around 5 years ago and have two enduring memories of it; it looked absolutely gorgeous and that I enjoyed the slow, methodical, tactical pacing of the action.
Ghost Recon: Future Soldier (GRFS) is the newest game in the series but I think Ubisoft, seeing the success of more arcadey shooters like Call of Duty, have decided to try to balance the tactical nature of earlier games in the Ghost Recon series with more run-and-gun style seen in arcadey shooters. Unfortunately, the result is a game that seems caught in limbo between the two doctrines.
GRFS has all the features you'd expect in a top tier 3rd person shooter - cover mechanics, tons of different weapons, a Gears of War-style recovery/bleed-out and more. The 'Future Soldier' aspect comes from the variety of different gadgets and technology your 4-man team has access to. You can use a robotic drone to fly/drive around the battlefield to scope out and mark targets. You can also use Predator-style active camouflage to sneak around undetected. You also have a 'futuristic' HUD that shows the location of enemies through cover.
The controls are solid, very responsive and mention must be made of the ingenious way you can move from cover to cover. Once you're behind cover, you can look to another area of cover, hold down A and then you automatically run to that area. It's a very simple system but it works brilliantly and is something that other 3rd person games need to borrow.
So far, so good but unfortunately, the single-player experience falls flat because of gameplay that is in limbo between being a tactical shooter like the older Ghost Recon games and a more arcadey shooter like Gears of War. It also doesn't help that the mission design is often atrocious and that your teammate's AI is utter garbage. It seems as though more than a third of the missions are stealth-only missions that result in a game-over message the moment you're detected. A lot of times I found trial and error was the only way to get through them. Other missions are the complete opposite with infantry coming from every angle and you're running around the battlefield like Captain Price and Soap, absorbing bullets and capping Russians left, right and center a la Call of Duty (only COD does it better). The last 10 minutes of the game have you literally running through the forest chasing someone while shooting enemy troops along the way. Absolutely no tactical thought needed.
You can't order your teammates to move to different positions (you could in previous games) but you can mark/designate opposing soldiers for them to take out. Unfortunately, AI path-finding is awful. Through the course of the overly-long 10+ hour single-player campaign I had FIVE different instances where I had to re-start from a checkpoint because one of my AI squad-mates got stuck trying to walk through a wall rather than go through a door. I would be at the next check-point, waiting for it to unlock only to see a message stating I had to wait for all of my squad. I'd run back and then see one of the 3 generic idiots you roll with literally banging his head into a wall. For a 'triple A' title in 2012 that's just unacceptable.
The game's narrative is also disappointing because while you can clearly see a ton of effort was put into it (it's more than 10 hours long and there are a lot of cut-scenes as well as in-mission dialogue) it just doesn't come together. There's something about a Russian coup and missing weapons but I couldn't follow and really didn't give a shit after the first 2 hours. At some point in the middle you're in Siberia controlling an indestructible mini-mech with infinite rockets and you wonder why the Ghosts just don't take this thing with them wherever they go...
Ubisoft also tried to ape Battlefield: Bad Company's foursome of characters but while I can easily ring off the names of Sweetwater, Marlowe, Haggard and Redford I couldn't begin to tell you the names of the guys in GRFS. I know there's a guy with a southern accent and the black guy is your squad leader (even though you spend the entirety of the game giving HIM orders). That's about it.
It's all a shame because there are some good ideas here and there are a few, albeit brief, moments where everything comes together nicely such as a part of the level in Zambia where a Sandstorm comes in and reduces visibility to zero. Or, my favourite part of the game, the first section of the final mission where you have to assassinate several targets. Unfortunately, these moments don't make up for the mediocrity you have to endure the other 90% of the time.
The single-player in Ghost Recon: Future Soldier isn't bad (except for those times when the AI renders the game broken) but it's not very good either. If you're a huge fan of tactical shooters like the previous Ghost Recon: Advance Warfighter games I'd steer well clear - it's nothing like the other games. If you're a fan of run-and-gun 3rd person shooters I'd probably wait for this one to go on sale.
Lavan
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