Distress Call
Breakpoint is an interesting title, not so much in relation to what goes on in the game, in that sense it could have been called Stevenage Apples and had about as much relevance, but as wider commentary on Ubisoft’s approach to game development it seems acutely insightful as a desperate cry for help from a developer staring teary-eyed into a vast abyss of creative oblivion.
Anyone with even a passing notice would be aware of the wonderful incompetence that has engulfed this game like a faeces tornado. Yet even if polished to within an inch of itself it would still be one, very shiny, very well made digital torture device, perhaps designed to test your own breakpoint and not just that of the clearly beleaguered developers.
Turns out however that I don’t even have a breakpoint as I managed to finish the ghastly thing. It’s not that the concept is flawed; open world sneaky-sneaky-stabby-shooty worked out pretty great for Metal Gear Solid 5, it’s just that somehow Ubisoft Paris have managed to ruin the idea by dumping almost every Ubisoft sandbox and multiplayer system into it, drowning the core gameplay in so much unwanted garbage so as to suffocate out any sort of fun it might have possessed otherwise.
So beyond the mostly competent third person action we have loot with associated gear levels and upgrades, mods, item blueprints, resource gathering for the now mandatory item and temporary buff crafting, faction missions, co-op and pvp modes including a raid, emblems, emotes, perks, passive skills, multiple currencies, a million and one repetitive activities spread across the vast map and one truly awful menu system.
Oh yes, and there’s a stamina meter, because traversal is so much more enjoyable when you have it tied to yet another fucking meter you have to wait to recharge. It’s insane, and doesn’t improve anything. If the game was aiming for realism then why all the features, UI elements and live-service wank? If it wanted tits/balls-out fun then why all the stop-start nonsense with stamina, survival crafting and boring real-world weapons and cosmetics?
The story is another symptom of this in that it hints at some science fiction weirdness yet ends up just being about drones (I swear this game may just be a version of when that 911 caller got help by pretending to order pizza). You are Nomad, all around tough guy/girl whose team of all around tough guys/girls get shot down investigating a missing ship off the coast of a mysterious archipelago. Only it’s not that mysterious and is in fact home to alternative reality Elon Musk and his teams of tech nerds and scientists. As it turns out they have been forced into helping Jon Bernthal’s murderous PMC and now some global hi-jinks is afoot which you must avert.
So let me get this straight Ghost Recon: Breakpoint; you are about how a bunch of talented engineers, scientists and other creative people have been effectively enslaved into abandoning their dreams of cool new ideas and technologies and instead are being forced into making weapons and drones for unimaginative, overly-aggressive morons? The fact that Ubisoft were happy to put this game out speaks volumes I fear.
For what it’s worth Bernthal does try his best to be entertaining, he barks and drawls and grunts yet the script doesn’t really give him much to work with. This is a story on sufferance; no personality, no style or substance, just very boring people saying very boring things before tasking you with going to a place to kill some dudes again.
Mission design is quite basic, but the game’s open approach is capable of producing some fun moments from time to time. Sniping from distance was my MO and it is entertaining to watch as your targets panic and hide after a nearby ally drops dead, even better when they send the helicopter up as a quick switch to armour-piercing rounds ends that flight prematurely and in a chucklesome firestorm. Draw distance and bullet drop was also decent enough to allow for some satisfying shots at long range.
Stealth is also fun when it works. Again the idea is sound but with the claustrophobic camera it can be a small hell to try and navigate within buildings whilst keeping a decent eye on your surroundings. In more open environments the game does better but overall the stealth has a neat dynamism in how you have freedom to approach from various angles and utilise a varied suite of gadgets and skills.
The world, whilst not particularly striking, does have some arresting views. The mixture of swamps, forests, more open plains and snowy mountains are not especially varied but are nevertheless well rendered, and the weather effects can produce some quite affecting scenery when you’re out alone in the wilderness. If the man-made structures weren’t so repetitive I’d have said the world design was a net positive, but as it is it merely feels like a wasted effort in an experience that has little time for anything so lofty as generating emotions or being immersive.
This extends to the music which is notable by how utterly forgettable it is. Apparently someone thought it worthwhile to do a dev diary about it, but again, one suspects sufferance over enthusiasm… at least that is the hope.
In its current guise Ghost Recon: Breakpoint is AAA gaming at its worst; an experience made with superior numbers, superior resources and yet aspires to be little more than a bloated plagiarism of other, better games, all in the service of making money from micro-transaction filth. Fun is incidental and nearly always self generated, as is any creativity or imagination. It’s hard to know whether to be angry or feel pity for the souls that had to make this drivel, but it’s easy to see that any attempt to rejuvenate it will take more than some smoother animations and bug fixes.