This game has some pretty poor writing, a number of really awkward design choices that feel more like bugs (in addition to actual bugs) and a strange way to integrate story. This may make a poor first impression. However, the story structure is interesting and there is a lot of open-world fun to be had.
Pros:
- Customisation.
Customisation is an important and fun feature in open world games (which often gets ignored by professional critics). I was pleased to start the game with a fairly detailed character creator. You can change the face, hairstyle, and a lot of cosmetic stuff with regard to your outfit, including several camo-patterns from the modern military like MARPAT and AOR. On top of that, there are many different weapons you can get in this game and each weapon can be customized with different parts, such as barrels, triggers and scopes. The one thing I personally hated about the previous Ghost Recon game was that the weapons and parts had to be unlocked one by one. Weapon unlockables feel fake to me and against the spirit of Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six games. This mechanic is also present in this game but the weapons are spread throughout the map and you can unlock them at any time by simply going to the location where the weapon is, and you can look up these locations on the internet. This is a good compromise that enables people to have fun treasure-hunting the guns and enables me to start the game with whatever sniper rifle I want.
- Open world fun
The whole map is open from the start and you can complete the objectives in whatever order you want. You drive around, blow stuff up, parachute out, ambush convoys and run away when stuff gets too hot. The world is your oyster. Critics often denounce games that feel like "busywork" and Wildlands does have some of it (more on that later), but at least there enough stuff here for the gameplay to feel very dynamic.
- Graphics
This is a conflicting one because it will also be mentioned in the "Cons" section, but I do not remember the last game where I could see so much vegetation on screen at the same time. There is a lot of variety to the environment, from desert to jungle to mountains. Destruction looks good as the glass shatters and cars get perforated. The graphical settings in this game are quite extensive and the world looks alive, with its birds, traffic, trees and the atmospheric fog during sunrise.
- Sound
I fired my rifle without a suppressor for the first time and was immediately impressed with the semi-realistic echo. The sound effects are just good, and have not been buggy so far.
- Story
I was originally going to put story as one of the cons, but having played this game for a while now, I've come around on it. I decided to look at the story structure separately from the writing, the latter being quite poor. The map is divided into provinces and each province has its own sub-story and characters. The story is told through radio communications and optional video cut-scenes (you get a button prompt). You don't get a feeling of a big central storyline like with a lot of modern games, because you can go to any province and do some missions there, watch some optional video's, then go somewhere else and come back later. This structure feels weird at first but it does make sense when you think of it in terms of intel. After all, you are a special forces team behind enemy lines and you collect various intel in order to dismantle this large drug cartel piece by piece. Cut-scene video's just feel like a part of that body of intel, together with various documents you find and interrogations that you carry out. Now, whenever the cutscenes or the radio tries to be funny, they fail miserably due to poor writing, but I do like the narration by the main villain and the the acting of your CIA handler is also not bad. With time, you get a better sense of the character of these two people.
This constant flow of intel is well-integrated in the missions that you are given. This actually provides a surprising amount of meaning to what would otherwise be a very dry shooter. Normally, when I play a shooter, I can't tell you what I am doing at any given point because the boring political story quickly gets lost in the loud explosions, but thanks to the fleshed out missions in Wildlands, I can actually tell you what I did in in the past few days and why. That is quite an achievement!
Cons:
- Repetitive gameplay
It does feel like a job at times. It's a fun job, but a job nonetheless. You keep running around, assaulting outposts and gathering intel in order to get to fight the boss of the region and then you move onto the next region. Despite the game's attempt to flesh out your actions with backstory, in the end you are just executing guerrilla-style attacks over and over again. The variety comes from the dynamic open-world mechanics, but that may not be enough to get you to keep playing this game all the way to the end.
- Writing
This has already been covered on this website, but the dialogue is pretty bad and the cut-scenes try to be funny without success. At one point I found myself closing my eyes and grasping the bridge of my nose because of how painful the attempt at humour was. And many of the choices that the "good guys" make are really stupid. This game is not about the writing, but it makes the other flaws that much more apparent.
- Graphics & performance
Even on the lower settings, my older machine cannot quite handle this game and there is always a small delay between moving the mouse and the cursor moving in the game. There is a benchmark in the game that can give you the FPS for your settings but it's a completely inaccurate representation of the actual performance in the game, which turns especially sour when I get into vehicles and start driving around.
There is a prevalent twitchiness in the graphics..or flicker...ness. The shadows, the moving grass, the ghillie suit on my head, everything twitches or flickers and the occasional framerate stutter doesn't help.
- Teamwork mechanics
You have 3 AI's in your team following you around. Now that can be a problem in a game where stealth or at least an element of surprise is important. Old Ghost Recon games solved this by allowing you to have extensive control over each team member. This game sadly does not grant that level of control. The developers' solution? The enemies simply cannot detect your teammates, only you...that is until they can. It feels like a bug, until you realize that it's not.
Another problem is with sync shots. You can tag enemies in order for your team to take them down simultaneously. This is a core mechanic of the game and you will probably be doing it a lot. You soon realise, however, that your teammates clearly did not have a line of sight on the enemy when they took their shots. Did their bullets curve around the f*(%&g mountain? Again this feels like horrible bug, until you realise that this is just the way they implemented this gameplay mechanic . This kind of stuff really breaks immersion and forces you to use your imagination to suspend disbelief.
Clearly, the game was designed to have people play it in co-op, but who has 3 other friends who are also able to be online at the same time and want to play the same mission as you do? You can play this game with strangers, but that's not how human interaction works. When you play with strangers, there is no communication and interaction is awkward.
- Music
There is a minimalistic approach to music in this game. During tense moments, you just here this low tone pulsating, which stops once all the enemies in the area are dead. The radio in vehicles only has one station. Would it have killed them to add some local Bolivian radio stations? Having said that, I have since tried to explore the Bolivian music scene and found that it is mostly rock with some folk elements, which I agree would not fit this game very much. Back to my Spotify collection of Mexican gangsta rap I guess...
Conclusion:
I have been wanting a game based on Clear and Present Danger and Sicario movies for a while and this scratches that itch. The problem is that this game quickly starts feeling like an actual job, albeit a fun job. There is some variety in the missions and they are backed by a story, but after a while you may get tired of assaulting enemy bases and convoys. Perhaps this game can be best used as a way to clear your mind on a Wednesday evening. Keep it on your PC for a year, drop in every now and then to do a mission or two and then go do something else. It is a fun open world game, but a page-turner it is not.