Revisiting Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands

[Music] me this video is going to be a little different from others that i've done in the past and that it's the first time i'm covering something from my channel that i previously covered for an actual mainstream outlet when tom clancy's ghost recon wildlands first came out i was given the opportunity to review it for the website polygon and that ended up being one of the highlights of my brief time doing actual professional freelancing since then tom clancy's ghost recon wildlands has had a ton of post-release content come out for it and more than that i've kept thinking about the game over the past couple years looking for an excuse to return to it at the time of this writing the world's about nine weeks deep into self-quarantine on account of the kovit-19 pandemic and i'm personally in the middle of moving this month so i've been stressed as hell and trapped inside and that's where most everyone else is as well so why not then go back to the game that presents me with an entire south american country to play around in a game that doesn't require much more than the weary two brain cells i have left to rub together that sounded nice like a television vacation and coming back to the game i found it just as compelling and conflicted as i did the first time around but this time i'm able to get a little deeper into it publication media relies on the billy joel principle of editing namely that if you're going to have a hit you've got to make it fit so i only got around 2 000 words to spend on the game the first time that kind of restriction certainly made me grow as a writer it's heartbreaking to be put in a room with two of your favorite paragraphs and a bullet for one of them but it's also a ways off from the format that i've adopted for this channel which is to use as many words as i like and trust you to close the tab when that gets irritating so before i really get going let me say this this video is completely unaffiliated with polygon or its parent companies i've even purchased a new separate copy of the game than the review copy i was initially given the script is new as well and while i might touch on some of the same general opinions the plan here is to cover the game my own way years after the fact i've lost track of what the contract i originally signed looked like when i covered the game so if this video is in violation of that i'll take it down without complaint if you're watching this though that hasn't happened yet i never would have even tried the game in the first place if i hadn't been asked to do so for money tom clancy is an author who style and whose creative universe i've generally always found pedantic in off-putting he has an unbelievable fetish for military technicalities the extreme specifics of equipment organizations and on-paper tactics like people complain about jrr tolkien style because he's similarly detail-obsessed in a fantasy context but something about fantasy as a genre makes that easier to forgive for me than a guy who might have a whole plot point hinge on one kind of helicopter being subtly different than another kind of helicopter in gaming the tom clancy brand's always been associated with kind of simulational realism like rainbow six where a single bullet is as fatal as a single bullet typically actually is i struggle a lot with games where the margin for error is so razor thin so i've generally avoided the brand in favor of more arcade action titles but when you have a chance to cover a triple a title for a worldwide publication you say yes so i played the hell out of it mostly from a koa campground in holbrook arizona while i was on my bus adventure in 2017. wildlands was not the game i was expecting at all three years and half a dozen content drops later and it's still defying my expectations of what kind of game it wants to be i don't think it ever figured that out for itself wildlands honestly has less to do with tom clancy than it does with trying to find a new angle on the endlessly replicated ubisoft open world formula i've been playing a lot of ubisoft open worlds these past few years and wildlands is just another iteration of the formula on its surface even below the surface it's an uphill battle to distinguish its key mechanics in a way that is remotely unique the formula has been in circulation since far cry 3 and for all the many layers of sophistication that violence has beyond that older simpler title the central objectives and rhythms of clearing outposts in a paradise vacation land is still fully intact wildlands is third person and oriented around a co-op squad of four but there is actually no creative distance between far cry's outposts and the core encounter design and wildlands use binoculars or a drone to scout and tag the enemies to your hud you snipe silently for a while or you creep up for melee kills to put their numbers more in your favor you choose whether to bother disabling the reinforcement alarms or not and if you mess up it's a loud and punishing firefight with a wide array of customizable weapons the enemies are even basically tagged the same way as they are in the far cry franchise or the watchdogs games for that matter a simple blip for regular enemies a shield symbol for the armored heavies across hairs for the snipers it's not just a general series of assumptions about a player's mechanical literacy it's a lexicon of symbols that are branded to ubisoft and their particular style of extremely high budget checklist oriented open world design there are bits and pieces of the tom clancy brand here and there like in the weapon variety but it's also thoroughly blended with pan ubisoft presentational choices that none of it feels the way i expected the game with tom clancy's name on it to go there are if you count the loot box variations and bonuses hundreds of different kinds of guns in the game there are a variety of stats for everyone and some of them do feel appreciably different from one another in terms of sound effects firing rhythms and effective ranges these guns are spread across the 21 regions in a pattern without much logic each region has two or three and sure the harder regions have better guns but you can do any region in any order so the guns have to be distributed across the broader world map in a way that doesn't excessively punish or especially reward a particular play order you can beat the game with your starting equipment if you truly wanted to and it wouldn't even be a tremendously hard thing to do what matters is a gun's function in its broad category short-range pistols and shotguns shorten mid-range submachine guns mid-range long-range assault rifles distant sniper rifles crowd control light machine guns knowing which weapon category is appropriate to which mission is important choices between quiet and loud weapons matter but the overwhelming purpose of all this military hardware is simply to provide texture that's the tom clancy thing military fantasy is like other genre fantasy and that the specifics matter very much to the hardcore fan base in a way that's kind of lost to a more popular audience the crack of one rifle or another the staccato assurance of an admired brand of firearm this is every bit as indulgent as when science fiction goes on and on about one sort of starship drive or another or when people get so into traditional fantasy magic systems that there are arguments over reagents and somatic components it's also every bit is critical to the tone and purpose of the fantasy at play i didn't start out caring about these things and i still don't in any real world way but in exploring the outrageously long list of custom weapon options available i found myself choosing weapons the same way i might choose hats for an rpg character always refreshing the look to keep the vibe novel weapon acquisition and customization is an in-depth part of the game a focal point for the game's collect-a-thon and a major driver of how content is divided across the map it's also largely frivolous because the game isn't able to account for unequal escalation based on player choice so it flattens the edges of these choices in a way so they don't actually hurt anyone this isn't a bad design approach mind it presents its own problems and creates some self-defeating feedback loops but consider the alternative a linear ideal progression that saps the agency out of navigating a virtual world so large it's effectively imitative of an entire real world country so much of the joy of wildlands isn't in being a tom clancy game but in being an especially large playground for a very familiar constellation of player activities tom clancy games are simulational at heart wildlands has an upper difficulty level that's meant to feel that way but there's no serious tactical plan that can't be matched by a comedic slapstick plan that uses the open world mechanics to cheese an objective open worlds if they're good are meant to be broken and bent by the player meant to be elastic to the point that you can do something elaborate artificial and impossible and still be rewarded for it an essential dissonance in the game and there are many is no more than this wildlands cares so much about delivering a military fantasy and so effectively delivers it that it completely abandons any possible pretense of the military grit that it seems obsessed with that isn't to say it doesn't try it tries unbelievably hard to be gritty and where possible snake fuckingly mean it's just that wildlands tells a story of extrajudicial violence so excessive so corny so utterly unbelievable in its basic concept that it makes the new jack ryan adaptation look like a college-level poli-sci course anything that wildlands might want to seriously say is undermined by its complete and total failure to present any of its subject matter in a grounded way here's the basic setup a mexican drug cartel santa blanca is run by a man named el sueno he is large and cruel largely cruel by the magic of expositional summary his cartel infiltrates and then takes over the entire country of bolivia to create the world's first narco state cia handler karen bowman and her team of four ghost recon operatives will land in bolivia dismantle the entire cartel arrest sueno and then disappear into the redacted files of the us defense department easy right i mean the entire premise pivots on too deeply held deeply flawed american myths one being that latin america is culturally significant only as it relates to u.s policy in the drug war and two being that american troops are the best in the world by a margin so large that four against an entire country is basically no contest the whole santa blanca cartel angle is a fascinating dodge of narrative accountability in this department problem one bolivia is a real country with real things going on besides the production and distribution of cocaine solution one a hostile takeover by an organization who'll make it so that cocaine is the only thing that anyone's involved in problem two ubisoft as a worldwide publisher does have some understanding of how it comes across to have four americans dictating the fictional future of a factual country solution to construct the antagonist's organization so that it's also a foreign influence an attempt at cancelling out the colonialist criticism of the heroes by creating an even more egregious act of colonialism on the part of the villains the ghost recon team spends most of the game up until the very last mission helping the native bolivian rebellion they're driving out a hostile invader and freeing bolivia to be bolivia again you'll buy that won't you most interestingly of all this frame of bad statist villain invader versus good underdog liberation invader keeps the bolivian people always in the abstract they're rarely the actual focal point of what's going on neither the heroes nor the villains just the anonymous background characters who provide motivation and context to the main cast sound blanca is still a by the numbers central american drug cartel the ghosts are still stock standard team america world police types the central assumptions and optics of the game are set in stone but the game can accurately say it's not actively saying anything negative about bolivia because bolivia hardly enters into it at all when it comes to the structure and substance of the plot i am past getting mad at ubisoft for claiming to make non-political games when they're clearly doing the opposite i'm now at the point where i actually kind of admire the craft that goes into stepping so so close to a line where the game would have had to take some kind of stand for what it's conveying and then refraining from crossing that line all the way it's death defying like those free climbers on a cliff face who are only ever centimeters away from falling off into nothing but somehow still manage to find just the right hand holds anyway zanda blanca offers you an excuse to go to war a very personal war with a whole nation while still saying yeah they're just they're all bad guys go nuts kill them all there are two dozen villains to chew your ways through each with a gimmick all of them soap opera levels of ridiculous the excessive comedic characterization they get is i think another hedge against being taken too seriously by folks turning a critical eye to the game's politics all of them are so cartoonishly awful that no one could ever have an objection to them as being villains same with a cartel as a whole they're bad people doing bad [ __ ] full stop this is even a deviation from the tom clancy brand as kind of predictable as they may be clancy's novels and most of the media adaptations of his work do try and present a certain level of casual truthiness and spend meaningful time on a villain's motivations the narrative simplicity here is more a defensive function of trying to graft an open world fantasy playground for four onto a real world home for millions in my original review there was one moment that really stood out to me as representative of the whole thing in which i wanted to critically interrogate this time around to see if it's still held up in the espiritu santu region the villain there is a priestess of santa muerte she blesses the cartels fighters and she practices human sacrifice there are notes you can find where other major antagonists disagree with her theatrics but still she's getting campily weird with it that being the case it's fine if the game asks you to assassinate her priests and steal sueno's bible right one assassination is meant to take place as a bunch of cartel heavies are having a church service the name of the game mechanically in wildlands is surprise if you can do something precisely and if you can do something secretly those are the best possible solutions so storming the church is a poor option wildlands like watch dogs 2 invests a lot of effort into providing drone related solutions to a player it's the primary spotting device you'll use all game long to plan attacks and prevail in firefights by marking the enemies beforehand you can get grown variations of varying utility like an emp drone to kill floodlights and open gates or an explosive drone for tactical crowd control if you've got a target in the middle of a crowded room full of other powerful enemies for instance originally when i blew up that drone in the middle of the church the moment kinda took me by surprise i fired the drone and beat the mission about half a minute after arriving in the mission zone and then i was gone again in less time than that by wildland standards it was a perfectly executed execution no one saw me the visual drama was high the player feedback was enjoyable there's just something about the feeling of having bested someone or some circumstance that is universally pleasurable even an ancient and utterly non-controversial game like gin rummy relies on the thrill of kicking someone else's ass even if only at cards there is nothing mechanically amiss here narratively i did a war crime without really thinking about it it was only after on the exfiltration where my mind stopped saying good job optimal murder to instead say oh wait a minute was i reading too much into that the first time around having done it twice i really don't think so even knowing what was coming up the drone is absolutely the most satisfying mechanically ideal way to accomplish the objective mechanically the church full of enemies is like a room full of dominoes that you can knock down in a deeply enjoyable way by just applying a flick of pressure in the right place contextualized as a combat encounter as a function of open world systems driven design what's objectionable suppose though that you're trying to actually suspend disbelief and imagine yourself an operative in the field you just did something an international court could and should jail you for if you cared karen bowman your cia handler is the one setting you up with these objectives and a lot of narrative work is done to assign her the most responsibility for the tone of how things transpire but the whole point of the ghosts in this game is that they're military vigilantes doing extrajudicially and unilaterally what a society's actual justice system would never permit you're meant to feel like a soldier so elite that the rules of warfare don't even apply to you asking whether wildlands is pro or anti-military is a trickier question than you might expect considering its obsessive relationship to the symbols and tools of it for all of that masturbatory technicality the ghost recon squad are rarely portrayed as being good guys while you're certainly in the role of both military and law enforcement during your four-man war on the narco state the game itself sneers at any kind of professional norm or limitation that would elevate your character from being just as criminal and cruel as the santa blanca cartel when i was first putting this video together the pandemic was culturally joined by a worldwide reaction to the murder in minneapolis of george floyd by several policemen who knelt on his neck until he died i mothballed this script for several weeks as the protests got larger and larger and the country began to reckon with in a way that it hadn't before the idea that rarely in america do police action and true justice go hand in hand i was editing together a section on karen bowman your say a handler in the game and the many interrogations where she threatens the people you've hauled in not just with regular old beatings but with rape family separation psychological torture and some old-fashioned blowtorch torture on top i had been thinking of karen bowman as being so over the top that it was hard to place her outside the jack bauer archetype a character who's given free reign by the script to be as morally reprehensible as they care to be in service of getting the bad guy in a set period of time that is the cloth karen's cut from certainly however i no longer think it's possible to talk about the character so abstractly karen bowman is fictional poorly written and generally preposterous in every regard except for her core attitude that justice is power and means nothing besides to protect that power at any cost what's truly remarkable is how unrestrained she is in expressing that viewpoint to the point where she continually knocks the game's own idols off their pedestals in an attempt to add grit into a story that's barely more narratively coherent than an episode of gi joe wildlands is a game whose surface politics are certainly rather traditional and conservative yet at every turn bowman uses american social services and prison systems as a threat that's even more violent and damaging than her breaking your fingers right here right now she threatens no less than four people with rape and murder as a matter of course in the american prison system telling one man for example that she'll send him somewhere that neo-nazis will use him as a pincushion one woman agrees to turn against the cartel to save her family and bowman threatens her that if she doesn't tell them absolutely everything her children will be disappeared into the u.s foster care system where quote you know the kind of [ __ ] up [ __ ] that happens to kids in those homes one of the game's villains is a harvard graduate turned cartel chemist who's black he says to bowman he has rights if he's being detained so bowman says she has rights too the right to just have him shot in the forehead and left her rot in the street she explains to another woman that her husband who you've also detained is going into solitary confinement for so long that his brain will rot he'll go crazy after 20 years of solitary he'll wish he were dead and while she won't lift a finger to stop that from happening to him she might move some things around so it doesn't happen to her if she cooperates there's a saying about fascistic tendencies in modern conservative politics that these sorts of people try not to say the quiet part loud which is to say that these sorts of pundits try to package the inhumanity of what they're saying in a palatable way karen bowman just yells the quiet parts all game long over and over at the top of her lungs in wildlands the biggest threat of violence and injustice that bowman can come up with is itself the system we label justice the quiet part being said loud is that justice has nothing to do with it the system is about inhumane punishment that the powerful can use to compel the weak into doing exactly what they tell them to do there are many studies that actually show solitary confinement causes severe mental health and even physical health complications and yet we still use it nationally because sheer existence can be leveraged into a threat there's no justice in that just more power the foster care system is supposed to provide an actual social service to try and ensure stable outcomes for children born in chaotic circumstances yet instead of trying to make that system better the bowman attitude weaponizes its most horrible predatory aspects there is a vested interest in bowman's perspective to have child abuse continue unchecked because then the threat of having someone's children taken away and as she puts it disappeared into the system is more powerful than if there had been a benevolent component to the system in the first place negative inhumane outcomes are preferable in the bowman perspective because then these injustices become tools tools to threaten tools to coerce tools to silence the way wildlands tries to have it this is all fine because these guys are bad drug people doing bad drug things and according to the jack bauer principle of action screenplays the ends justify the means if the means make you look strong and badass enough while you're doing it the whole point of the ghost recon squad is that they're a plausibly deniable black ops unit that isn't beholden to any kind of notion of justice or any court of law but it's absolutely fascinating how damning to the game's own surface politics this frame becomes the obvious read on the game is that it is intensely pro-military but its complete disinterest in the military is having any kind of diplomatic qualities that might redeem it or indeed any ethical compass by which it might operate at all skews the kind of pro-military message it might want to express by poisoning the well of how its own characters are portrayed how can the game at once be so invested in military worship that it posits that all it would take is four special operatives in a month or two to overthrow a hostile nation while at the same time so completely rejecting the idea that there is any moral compass by which an american soldier might operate that it interrupts itself just about every hour on the hour for a little extra judicial torture and intimidation there's an american cliche that our military is the best in the world but ever since world war ii a large component of that cliche has been the aspirational hope that our soldiers would behave in a way respectable enough to earn the title that best did not just mean most powerful but most trustworthy as well i've known people who enlisted and pretty much every one of them signed up to do a job in a professional capacity because they felt on some level that it was a way for them to participate and contribute to the society they live in military service is above all service it takes an incredible level of trust and adhering to a complex system of rules and it takes a significant amount of de-prioritizing the ego and the self in favor of the group in an ideal outcome a soldier takes pride in the uniform they wear because the way they've worn the uniform the things they've done in it were somehow pro-social by way of preventing a greater violence from taking place and not antisocial by way of laying down hurt without rhyme or reason when wars are fought criminally or without rules like the vietnam wars real politic horrors or the first world wars naivety about chemical weapons and biological weapons it breaks people they don't come back the same war is the worst of what humanity can do to itself but the promise that gets people to sign up for it in the first place is the idea that it can be done professionally with rules that it can be done in a way that's serious without taking pleasure in the inherent cruelty of warfare i've never met a veteran whose ideal self resembled the ghost recon characters utterly callous completely indifferent to death and eager to resort to torture or anything else to achieve a goal while it is not correct to say that this professional self-image is broadly realistic or remotely universal viewing a soldier's job as being more about restraint than the exercise of power is the attitude you'd have to have to actually represent a pro-military viewpoint this is what makes wildland's military fantasy and such a gross fantasy at that it's disconnected itself from the professional pressures expectations and struggles of soldiering to instead paint this dark image of lone wolf operators with no oversight no morals and no limits instead what wildlands has is the daydream of the militiaman whose psychic evaluation had already long ago disqualified him from doing the actual job mechanically speaking the open world design of wildlands mostly precludes a traditional adherence to the rules of warfare it is always always easier to get the player to be lawless than it is to get them to obey laws but this is an area where abstraction and fictionalization can really help take hitman for example there's a franchise of nothing but amoral assassinations yet it's honest with that frame and in practice hitman titles are more puzzle games than action games they're fun because of how little they correspond to the real world how the narrative setting reinforces the mechanical focus on timed murder puzzles in a way that frees you to have fun with an amoral or immoral thing in an inconsequential environment wildland's presentation of plot and worldview is so aggressive so constant expositional video after expositional video all of them carefully edited to be sarcastic condescending and edgy that there is no true mechanical escape from having to form an opinion on all the [ __ ] being shoveled at you it is trying to create such an image of hardness of emotional distance and political nihilism using ripped from the headlines affectations that it totally undermines the high gloss high budget playfulness of the ubisoft open world format the game is so utterly nasty at times that it almost functions as an anti-military parody of u.s military intervention in latin america which isn't hard to do of course of the 56 different instances of u.s interference in south and latin america there's little you could point to as having had any meaningful positive effect most were proxy battles of the cold war where the actual enemy was an abstract idea of soviet influence almost universally they had zero impact on the united states and our own cultural memory while at the same time creating devastating instabilities in the countries in which these conflicts were fought the game suggests that individualistic motivations like vengeance and anger are valid national goals to pursue it glorifies the tools and training of the military only so much as their way of expressing that anger without consequence it sits in an awkward position where it's being more imitative of history than it even wants to be through sheer carelessness and indifference a truly pro-military game would be more coherent it would set up some kind of parallel where it looks back at that legacy of intervention and apologetically says but we meant well and wildlands does not do that a truly anti-military game would look at that legacy and use its plot to illustrate how damning and damaging those actions were to the local populations who were being used as pawns in a global game and wildlands does not do that either narratively it's the worst possible mashup of both worlds a game that takes the legacy of some of the united states most cynical unjustifiable conflicts and bafflingly concludes yeah the u.s military breaks laws and commits war crimes all the time because of how [ __ ] badass they are am i right for a long time american media has been telling itself stories where no distinction is drawn between power and justice where what matters is that our guy gets their guy and then we wash our hands of it wildlands wants to be that simple game except it just couldn't help screaming the quiet part loud so if that's how i feel about it why the [ __ ] did i want to replay this game so badly on account of how fun it is when it isn't speaking to me on account of its tremendous quality as a digital playground even if that playground atmosphere just intensifies how odious the rest of it comes across as the thing i remember most strongly the reason i most wanted to spend another 30 hours on the game is wildland's world map it's truly an industry achievement in open world aesthetics its commitment to maintaining visual fidelity with oblivion landscape is jaw-droppingly complete each of the 21 regions is distinctive from one another and can be identified just by the foliage the color of dirt and the verticality of the topography you could say well a lot of those are desert a lot of forest a lot of jungle but the artistry here is that each region is such a specific completely believable example of those broader landscape categories it's not just forest there are dry forests in the southeast with mossy boulders and towering pines there are deeply verdant jungle forests north of that so dense you can't land a helicopter see the sun through the canopy but that rainforest climate doesn't last beyond a belt of amazonian flora that peters out into northwestern deserts one jungle region will even be drier than the other dusty red roads instead of muddy brown ones i spent a lot of time traveling in the southwestern united states and a tremendous amount of the magnificence of the landscape comes from variations on a theme colors of rock and sand that shift as the miles go past the way the forces of erosion work on some cliff faces and not on others the slumps of particulate rock forming massive skirts around what mountains remain unflattened the spires and arches formed by blistering wind over untold time there is no such thing as just a desert what's especially tricky about deserts when it comes to video games is their proportions by and large these spaces are defined by extreme distance by far off and hazy mountains with windswept valleys between consider an open world like skyrims it uses mountain ranges to stagger and separate its regions but viewed from above you'd find them to be artificially discreet and compact many biomes arranged in a condensed space wildlands map is remarkable for feeling uncondensed for being meant to be viewed from above as helicopter transit is by far the easiest and most advantageous way to move medium or long distances in the game here when you peek over the edge of a mountain the landscape continues until it gradually blends into another configuration consider far cry 5's fidelity to the feeling of montana the three regions were all meant to be in a single county so it had much more proportional space to let the basin and range pattern play out naturalistically the proportions of wildland's world map are clever enough to allow micro variations of climate and flora to define regions from an in-vehicle and on-foot perspective while keeping those far cry 5-like mega-features of towering mountains lengthy slopes and pastoral meadowland that look so incredibly faithful to real life from a zoomed out aerial perspective no biome in wildlands is represented by fewer than two or three regions with the exception of the snow swept mountain peaks in the extreme southwestern region this allows the gradual natural transitions dry to wet mountainous to flat forest to plane to make total visual sense as a composite landscape my first video game experience with this kind of scale was world of warcraft but its transitions are so immediate and cartoonish that it looks utterly quaint in comparison proportionately wildland's map is still as condensed version of bolivia as gta 4 as liberty city is a condensed version of new york city they omit the vast vast majority of details yet still hold enough landmark features shapes and basic configurations to give a visceral and lasting impression of the place they're imitating these worlds aren't realistic they're creative distortions and illusions it takes an astonishing amount of artistry and technical craftsmanship to fashion a world that accomplishes these illusions effectively bolivia is one of the world's most beautiful countries if wildlands is only going to correctly portray one thing about the nation that's not a terrible choice to go with the amazing variety of the landscape goes hand in hand with a meticulously detailed recreation of towns factories and points of interest within that landscape wildlands cut some corners with building interiors and building templates being used in great repetition but that's not nearly so important as how wonderfully proportioned these points of interest are to the larger game world a city feels like a small city and getting into urban firefights is a considerably different kind of fight than more rural encounters enemies are everywhere in buildings you can't see controlling the major entrances and exits to get through undetected in an urban area is a tense series of sprints from alleyway to alleyway or else chaos of popping gunfire and approaching engines if you're spotted from a high window the urban combat is difficult control and often overwhelming and that goes for bases and factories as well major assaults really do require a plan of attack and you need to put in time to scout enemy locations and anticipate a way to escape when the job at hand is done this is the most enjoyable part of the military fantasy playing soldier on multiple levels not just with a gun and a uniform but with the agency to plan and attempt to execute your own solutions to battlefield problems missions are rarely prescriptive and how you're meant to accomplish them with the notable exception of half dozen or so insta-fail stealth sequences instead the landscapes the towns the farms the factories all these aesthetic touches take on mechanical importance say you have an urban target then some assassination or a depot raid one option might be to wait until night so visibility for enemies is low but you can use night vision or thermal vision for your advantage you can sneak in through the jungle on foot and then silently murder your way to the objective on scene slowly a traditional approach but why not take advantage of what's offered steal a helicopter from elsewhere fly it over the city and then make a rapid descent to a rooftop right next to the objective weapons loud cutting through the guards to the objective and then pulling right back out again using the building's internal staircase and as cover from other buildings so you can protect yourself from fire until you reach the rooftop helicopter again disappearing into the night before the cartel footmen even have a chance to rally a counter-attack from their perimeter positions inter-faction warfare is a thing as well you can summon a rebel strike team with an upgradeable ability or bait the corrupt but extremely well-equipped unidad military into trading blows with santa blanca all three factions can create headaches for each other and all three operate on slightly different combat principles the rebels are the weakest and very lightly armed but the fully upgraded summon ability brings a whole dozen of them into the fight numbers you can bump up even more by freeing prisoners if there are any around while their role is cannon fodder and little else they have tremendous utility for distraction and cleanup like if you're most of the way into an enemy base but you find yourself pinned down they'll drive right through the front fence and cause a hell of a racket providing critical time distraction and opportunity for escape sonde blanca forces are well armed and often call reinforcements but only really local reinforcements your fights with them are contained to a small radius and they're easy to lose in a vehicle or by running into the dense jungle unidod forces however function like gta style police and that they have unlimited reinforcements and deploy those reinforcements more aggressively the more you engage with them in direct combat they're meant to overpower the player handily in bulk numbers and attracting their attention is always negative however their unlimited reinforcement waves make them exceptionally dangerous to entrench santa blanca positions so if you can get them trading bullets with a factional conflict at the front entrance of a cartel stronghold it'll gradually pull most of the patrols away from the rear of the area and allow for easy infiltration there are so many different complementary mechanics in the game that i can confidently say i haven't played another ubisoft title with such true mechanical freedom and how you complete the content this is on top of being able to choose to go to any region at any time without the arc of your progression bending and breaking these unpredictable largely player driven variables all come together to provide you uniquely memorable combat vignettes driving a stolen faction branded apc through a checkpoint in the dead of night slowly motoring into the middle of a fight that once it starts you might not be able to get back out of again or maybe flying a helicopter over mountain range at sunset descending toward a hostile town just as their lights blink on for the night or maybe you're weaving a motorcycle down dusty mountain switchbacks in pursuit of a supply convoy speeding past them to lay down a trap of proximity mines at the next bend in the road i love a linear game but wildlands is remarkable in how consistently it's able to deliver an experience that feels curated without hardly ever mandating the shape rhythm or even the visual mood of the gameplay at hand it's this expansive and joyful player freedom that makes the self-congratulatory pessimism of the plot especially off-putting because the mechanical vibe here leans way way farther towards the last 20 minutes of 1985's commando than anything that tom clancy ever did commando's commitment to trying to communicate anything serious or delve into political themes begins and ends with character actor dan hidea's utterly preposterous latin accent in that movie the vaguely south american villains weren't even in south america they've taken over one of the channel islands off the california coast for whatever reason that's because it genuinely doesn't [ __ ] matter at all who they are or where they're from they've got the daughter of colonel john matrix and for that they're gonna pay the movie does zero world building just relying on the charisma of its action sequences and its slightly winking cast and it works great that way it never trips over itself the way wildlands does with its inconsistent gestures towards edgy political commentary it's so frustrating that the game refused to fully embrace b-movie tonality when its cast of villains and its basic plot beats are by and large so completely over the top there's just a thin but powerful line of extremely determined misanthropy separating the player from the full hey bennett lit off some steam experience it's like a bulletproof partition when the script descends down on the game to pop off yet another headache inducing kidding not kidding video introduction to a new villain or bowman threatens yet another narco stooge with sexual assault and torture i just want the game to shut up so i can return to having fun fun being an actor which requires at least an ounce of actual playfulness in the mood to actually succeed what's interesting is how well the post-release content that was added to the game seems to understand this there are a solid half-dozen large multi-part missions that have been tacked onto the main campaign as bonuses over the past two years that the game was supported before they pivoted to ghost recon break point each and every one of them is silly most of them strangely are kind of indulgences for long-time tom clancy game fans take splinter cell for instance you like splinter cell while sam fisher shows up voiced by his original actor michael ironsides it's cable tv crossover episode nonsense fisher clearly doesn't mesh with the ghost recon aesthetic but here he is anyway your player character talks worshipfully of him and even goes so far as to say there's nothing i wouldn't do for my country but fisher well part of me wonders if maybe he goes too far in another conversation they summarize some of the many many splinter cell games and they sound like flash gordon adventures compared to a wildlands plotline it's a shame the mission itself is so difficult in the insta-fail self-sequence in a massive unidad base followed by a king of the hill style defense sequence against the highest possible military threat response which includes apache helicopters who fire rocket volleys followed by miles of being chased to an escape point by even more ever-spawning tanks and rocket choppers with no checkpoint fail anywhere in this mission you take it from the top it's punishing to agree that the main campaign never was and i appreciate the consistent openness of the original mission designs more in retrospect the moon may be lighter but it's more restrictive in actually solving the mission a better crossover is with some of the operatives from the latest rainbow six title siege which is kind of a meandering mission for a long while but then actually creates a rainbow six-ish climax where you have to breach and clear a university just crawling with heavy-duty bad guys it's a significant variation from the way indoor firefights usually go especially considering indoor firefights very rarely come up over the course of regular play usually the open world chaos makes it unpredictable how many people are in a room or how they're arranged but by using the breach mechanic each room in the university is tactically optimized in a rainbow six flavored way it's narratively about revenge killings mostly but it's too focused on banter between the crossover characters to feel that dark the oddest crossover of all is that they put the predator in the game like but from the movies and such the mission actually takes some time to tease out the predator before confronting him cycling through some classic images and imitations of the first movie the boss fight itself however is extremely unfun on account of its length the predator is a bullet sponge of tremendous proportions and all of his attacks are insta-kill sure you can be revived up to two times but that means you need to land a perfect attack on the predator 20 times or so and all he needs to do is land three average shots on you and it's game over any tension or nostalgia is smashed against the cliff wall of the guy's health reservoir taken together these deviations from the semi-serious tone of the release day campaign puts into perspective how inadequate it is to simply snarl fox news chirons in a threatening voice as a plot if you know you're going to be over the top leap over it shake some pom poms around i don't give a [ __ ] but it frustrates the hell out of me that they wouldn't just lean into commando when they ultimately decided to say [ __ ] it and include the predator itself in the end anyway the post release content is unexpectedly expansive also on par in terms of polish and link the suite of dlc missions for watchdogs too on a new save you can play these missions as soon as you reach the region they begin in but it's worth noting that they were designed with an in-game character in mind playing them earlier though nets you some interesting rewards like a stealth cloaking device you can wear as your otherwise decorative backpack more than that is how they were designed seemingly by looking at the map the missions and thinking what's left over what's most ridiculous there are three regions of the game that didn't have any sort of story missions at all when the game was launched yet all the infrastructure for the dlc missions were already there it was just unfinished or omitted on launch which strikes me as a little predatory on ubisoft's part i didn't mind paying for the game again as a big old ultimate bundle at like 70 off but i feel like the folks who did pay for dlc piecemail were not served well by it some of these missions like the crossover episode ones were free some that should have been free were not and the peruvian connection dlc is my number one example of that inca carmina the southwesternmost region is one of the most truly scenic and beautiful in the game it's higher in elevation than any other mountain extending up into snow-capped feats glacial valleys and threateningly deep wilderness you could always go there to collect weapons and documents and such but the peruvian connection adds the missions and the plot structure to the region like most open world games wildlands is a skinner box it rewards you periodically in a myriad of different ways to keep you invested and keep you occupied and pushing the buttons wildlands is noteworthy in how tightly complementary and well-paced these mechanical and structural rewards are missions have to be researched first so you go to the locations with the folder icons at these and all other locations are resource boxes which provide small boosts to pay for skills which you also need skill points for points that are found in much higher numbers through environmental exploration than they are through progression rewards yet at higher skill levels you need so many resources that you also have to go out and do resource raid side missions and if you're in the area and it's convenient why not do a rebel ability upgrade mission while you're at it and look based on the intel you just stole from the place you were already going for something else anyway there's a new gun right up the road the map is massive but it's constantly revealing itself locally in a satisfyingly interconnected process where you've got useful things to do and find in three out of the four comes directions no matter where you are until you've fully explored an area and only then is it time to move on the way they've made resource raids vehicle-centric also feeds into this you're meant to chase a convoy into a new region or a pilot cargo plane a quarter of the way across a map from your current mission because these accidental relocations just stick you in a new place where there are even more icons to discover and devour everything kind of feeds into everything else from the collect-a-thon mechanics to how level advancement works when a region is missing a third or half of these motivating icons something feels empty about it the lizard brain keeps hitting the button on the wall that dispenses fun but none rolls down the tube the peruvian connections missions are fast and fun but more importantly they give you a concrete reason to explore all the nooks and crannies of this beautifully designed game world and put you in proximity to a constellation of other exploratory icons putting such an incredible virtual place as inca carmina into the base game but charging extra for the behavioralistic motivation to actually go there is weird and frustrating same with the uni-dad conspiracy dlc media luna is a gorgeous region with a winding desert canyon and a large unidod presence the only unidad dominated region outside of the southeastern map the region from day one base launch has been a hell of anti-aircraft positions that make resource raids in the surrounding areas uniquely frustrating but without the dlc there's no reason to go down there and do anything about it it's a temporary inconvenience and you can always go steel planes somewhere else add in the dlc and it becomes an exciting and fun break from the broader area's mechanical pacing pitching you into harder fights against a more militarized enemy then medialuna gets further utilized by the operation silent spade dlc which takes the enormous unidod base there with that deep winding canyon and then mashes them up together into a single challenge mission where you have to steal a helicopter full of russian black market uranium fly it through the canyon and then win a two-on-one helicopter battle on the other side in part two of that operation you steal a big truck loaded with a dirty bomb and then stunt drive it into a marble quarry to save the city of barchavos the dlc's are highly entertaining big payoff missions deliberately crafted to top the original content without them though your game is riddled with holes as obviously as a wedge of swiss cheese complaints that the content is too monotonous that it spread across the map without enough variation and without much of a sense of escalation were so widespread that it influenced the encounter design of the game's sequel ghost recon breakpoint i get the complaints to a certain extent there's no real endgame phase the final boss unlocks after taking down just one of the four branches of the santa blanca cartel's spider web of power there are two endings the second of which is canonical and only unlocks after all the regions and all the story missions are complete but the first ending is fine perfectly adequate as far as being consistent with the tone and the story so far wildlands is a game geared towards completionism but not really one that even requires it i think the co-op focus is a major driver of that open-endedness the knowledge that most players will have contrasting amounts of in-game progress and allowing a player to do the final mission about a third of the way through the game lets them tag along with the friends who are much further towards the back half there's no urgency to anything you do as a result no arcs for any of the characters or even really much of an arc in the narrative but wildlands is so much about the mechanical moment that these are acceptable losses in the fight to make co-op function as effortlessly as possible and so massive a game space i didn't feel like the monotony was a function of this game specifically either the template for enemies and the sorts of missions are largely generic to the entire open world genre and ubisoft open worlds especially to say that wildlands is internally monotonous is unfair considering i've also willingly happily played three and a half far cry games almost just like it with a different camera perspective it's perfectly fine to say no thanks to this game if you're ubisofted out by the template but the regions provide so much visual variety and the cast of villains dumb as they are provide a colorful direction to the action that is internally distinct within the regions a mode was added since launch called tier 1 mode where you get wildly massive resource bonuses and the occasional inventory reward for opting into a system that's continually escalating its difficulty level by level i originally played the game on normal but mostly stuck to arcade this time around because i was playing on a controller tier 1 mode gave me a tour of all the higher difficulties as well but later in the game when i had enough skill points invested to make that increasing power disparity more fun early in the game when your skills are low or zeroed you just don't have enough mechanical options to really counter the ai when the ai is especially sensitive to noticing and attacking you there are 50 tiers in all the first five you can play an arcade the next five in normal the next five in advance and then all of the rest of the tiers are escalations from the game's already quite difficult expert mode the thing is all this content is very intimidating if you have to go as slow as you do in the harder modes it seems like if you were gonna do the whole game on expert it would take an actual slice of forever so coming into this slower more careful gameplay pattern later when the amount of remaining content was much smaller made me much more interested in trying it that way what i learned in tier one mode is that the difference between arcade and advanced difficulty really isn't that huge you're slower to be caught and much slower to be shot in arcade but the basic questions of whether a plan will work or not seem very much the same when i lived up to the title and ghosted in objective and advanced mode it was with a similar kind of plan as i'd try an arcade it just has to actually come off in a precise way this is more thrilling certainly because it feels like a real accomplishment and besting the uh the ai when the ai is skilled at sniffing you out is deeply satisfying weapons though are as lethal either way so a frontal assault with a rocket helicopter still works incredibly well even on advanced difficulty above tier 33 or so though i found the fun i was having was being rapidly bled out i wasn't even getting close to an objective before being spotted wasn't hardly having time to register being spotted before being killed this is more simulational sure but wildlands to me is a popcorn experience that's best when you're grabbing content by the fistful and cramming it into your brain hole spending the amount of time and care that you need to survive on expert seems contrary to the game's intention to the point that when it launched it had normal and advanced as your only two difficulty options arcade and expert are post-release concessions to widen the player base i did all the missions in all the regions in the game found all the weapons i maxed out my skill tree and there was never really a moment in all of that where i wasn't being actively mechanically entertained as many ways as there are to complete an objective there are equally as many settings to tweak the rhythm and tonality of the gameplay to what's individually satisfying to a player whether that means scaling up so that you need 10 whole minutes to scout and dismantle a small enemy camp or scaling down so you can just jump out of an airplane above an objective out of pure curiosity and have it be 50 50 in favor of that working out fine the tier 1 mode is a wonderful way to nudge players into trying all the other games that while lens can be as those settings escalate even if you play every other mission in the game before the final one where you go after el sueno you get the bad ending first it's bizarre you're actually required to do the whole thing over if you want to see the mechanical one even if you've met the requirements for it in the bad ending you're all set to arrest sueno so he'll face that good old-fashioned american justice that a bowman's been threatening everybody with but she gets a call that swino made a plea agreement and is going to give up all his rival cartels in exchange for immunity in this bad ending bowman just shoots him anyway why is this a bad ending that's actually hard to say i prefer it by a huge margin it's absolutely consistent with your actions and bowman's actions neither of you have given one solitary [ __ ] about following the rules of either cops or soldiers there's no compelling reason why they would now except for this amorphous idea of being accountable to the pentagon because even if you're extremely elite top-tier operators there's always someone more elite than you back in washington so bowman gets arrested and the other cartels move in and pick up the pieces you left behind everything is in chaos and no better than before if the game is so insistent about being morally gray even if it's a comically exaggerated grey then let it turn out that way with nothing but waste and hurt to show for it regardless of which ending you get the rebel army betrays you for no other reason than they were using you to do their work for them and now that the final blow is ready to be struck they want to take the credit for it it's just kind of amazing and how insultingly it's constructed it's painting the bolivian people the ones that you are ostensibly trying to save as both incompetent and lazy while the contrastingly extremely cool and important ghost team picks off their slack and also interferes with the rebels relatively well-earned revenge revenge that any member of the ghost team would be absolutely narratively permitted to pursue and get away with in a private arc it's just gross so bowman continuing to be gross and flat out shooting the guy tracks better in the good ending sueno gets his deal the idea is that with the information he gives all the other cartels will have been dealt such a blow that they can't effectively fill the power vacuum and the living government is able to reassert itself sueno meanwhile is free to continue to be a usable villain for the series bowman even laments that he'll just build up his cartel again right on schedule for tom clancy's ghost recon 17 this time with feeling i was expecting him to be the bad guy in breakpoint but instead that whole game is foreshadowed by the final piece of free downloadable content for wildlands the oh so slyly named operation oracle in it you help a disillusioned ghost named walker track down a scientist working for the mysterious skulltech corporation the central character building being done is that walker knowing the engineer has cost american lives ought to be able to just kill the engineer for it instead bowman cuts him a deal which disgusts him walker in breakpoint goes rogue and uses this corporation to carve out a techno-secessionist enclave on a fictional island his perspective as a villain is cleft along that same line the idea that there should be no compromise that the military was like a family and should respond therefore to the world with a kind of self-protective self-justified wrath of a wounded father or brother or whatever sounds best when spoken gruffly i wasn't interested in playing breakpoint i had had quite enough of wildlands by the time i got to the end of it the major mechanical difference i heard is how breakpoint uses special enemy units to mix up and counter design and create more tactical pressure that's not surprising because they experimented with that already right here in the game's second major expansion fallen ghosts fallen ghosts picks up after the canonical ending where the bolivian government comes back but then immediately throws that one tiny storytelling concession under the bus to say that this government hired a bunch of mercenaries to do their work who turned out to be just as corrupt or worse than the santa blanca cartel you can see structurally how they might have arrived there even if narratively it is pretty insulting the extra generous mercenaries are meant to be an overwhelmingly superior force and the intended tone of fallen ghosts is to have the player feel more like the hunted than the hunter it doesn't quite always come across that way which is mostly fine because the real function of the expansion is to directly address and workshop the issue of monotonous repetition and combat encounters and in that it's incredibly successful it is several orders of severity more difficult than the base game with its new faction directly countering the player's abilities on three fronts often all three ways at once all of the regions are cobbled together from existing areas of the eastern jungle biomes what makes them distinct is that each of the three region bosses represents one archetype of the new countering enemies with that particular enemy type being over-represented in the missions there the most basic is an armored heavy who cannot be killed any other way than a direct head shot explosions and bullets just bounce off him otherwise explosive drones under-barrel launchers and grenades were a get out of jail free card in many situations during the main campaign and this guy just keeps coming through all of that the next enemy type is a drone jamming specialist if you never got in the habit of using your binoculars to scout enemy camps in the main game you're often forced to by this guy they usually appear in small clusters as well making the situation you're about to enter dangerously unreadable if you can't suss out and snipe these fellas beforehand finally there's a whole class of enemy who uses the cloaking device you got from that one bonus mission even on lower difficulties they put you down fast with a head shot if they catch you unawares the solution is to use your thermal vision the only situation the game's ever engineered that really requires you to use it mechanically speaking it hits the predator vibe much more closely than the on-brand predator mission did it's intense and having to keep in mind that these invisible enemies could be mixed in with larger more traditional groupings makes regular encounters slightly more paranoid it's disappointing in many ways that the expansion recycles the main map because that's the only thing holding fallen ghosts back from feeling truly novel to the main content many times climactic moments and important missions and fallen ghosts will take place at landmarks you're certain to recognize since no new buildings or areas have been added and choosing the memorable ones works as a double-edged sword since so much of the behavioralist feedback you got from the main campaign was related to checklisting and 100 in an area it frustrates on some deep level to have that completion reset in terms of encounter design however each region feels more distinct than it ever has missions are carefully tailored to highlight the strengths of these new enemy types and keep the player at a permanent disadvantage luckily you come in with whatever skill points you've invested in the main campaign so the entire thing functions as max level and game content it's a feeling of mechanical climax that the base game genuinely does lack mercifully bowman is barely in it and the unrelenting obnoxiousness of her characters put into sharp focus by how much more tonally consistent the expansion manages to be a replacement is a cia operative much lower on the totem pole who goes by socrates what's key is that he's in way over his head he doesn't really believe he'll survive yet he's still trying to behave as professionally as possible anyway he's actually a likable character and he helps sell the idea that you're all underwater on this one otherwise there is extremely little in the way of plot the villains don't get noisy introductory videos the missions are challenging but mostly self-contained and santa blanca itself has a strikingly minimal presence completely outclassed in any fight reduced to a few crumbling enclaves that you help usher out the door into oblivion the focus is simply on gameplay with a specific interest in diversifying that gameplay from the loops present at the main campaign coupled with a humbler more believable voice providing radio support the expansion pulls itself together in a way that's much more coherent than the main campaign the new regions are larger than the ones they're cobbled together from but the content is spread out more straightforwardly making the amount of time it takes to chew through the content and finish the regions a little quicker than the original content meanwhile the new enemy types make missions longer and more difficult lending the more memorable gameplay identities than the wheel of content style objectives that dominated the main campaign fallen ghosts is perfect as an expansion i would tear my hair out though if i had to do 21 regions at this difficulty but for just three massively jam-packed regions i'm completely invested it establishes a unique mechanical and tonal identity despite essentially being more of the same in the same map the non-story wraps to a close when all four targets are dead and you've had your fill of the side content then it's time to helicopter off into the sunset and get your break point on it's unfair to call this mindless content because there's millions of dollars of technical craftsmanship on display here but it is fair to say that wildlands is only truly good when you don't think too hard about it to be invested in the mechanical present tense and early disconnected from everything else is to find the most enjoyment in it fallen ghosts is built on that understanding it abides by it in its structure and its gameplay it engages with its own storytelling as little as possible to establish the bare minimum of mood and motivation relying instead on the dozens of overlapping game systems to do the actual heavy lifting of the experience whenever it tries to approach its world building it falls on its face the extra generos are just bizarre a super high-tech outfit who are nevertheless even more pointlessly bloodthirsty than santa blanca don't they care about their own profits at all they only make sense as a structural presence a third faction but even unidad to shame in terms of militarized response to the player's actions at the end of the expansion there's a moment where the ghosts chat about what happens next and one says that the people of bolivia get to choose now there'll be a lot of angry people that's democracy in action says another then your own player character breaks the goddamn fourth wall and addresses the player directly to say if you want to keep it you have to fight for it and like wow amazing example here where we shot the people who were fighting for it in the last campaign because there were a bunch of glory hounds after your rightful kill it is astoundingly dumb for the character to say this thing in lieu of everything you actually do in the games what part of this has ever been about democracy why was he talking to me is he trying to tell me hey man don't just vote get off your ass and fly a helicopter into some [ __ ] bad guys because if i joined the military i'd be facing a tribunal for like 89 of what i've done in this game as this character it's like duke nukem breaking the fourth wall to tell me that really respecting women means calling your mom on mother's day it's not a totally untrue cliche but it couldn't be a less credible source delivering it thanks for killing all these invisible sniper dudes hope this makes you think about how freedom isn't free it's a microcosm of the broader issue of the game understanding itself to have a traditionally conservative fox newsy outlook while undermining even that with meaningless self-parody throughout could be worse though it could be cartel road i honestly have never played a piece of content with a stamp of approval from a publisher so large as ubisoft that was such unrepentant garbage cartel road is irredeemably aggressively impossibly terrible in every way it is simultaneously the absolute worst possible combinations of gameplay mechanics paired with the worst racial stereotyping and then presented in a way that somehow triples down on how obnoxious all that is it's an expansion whose frame is that as an undercover cia agent you have to do monster truck stunts for social media followers in order to impress and then execute high-ranking sicarios it manages to somehow start from there and immediately go downhill towards a bottom that gets farther and farther away the deeper you get into the content it is positively the stupidest thing i've ever played worse even than call of duarez the cartel because the call of juarez game never insisted on having me do finicky plane stunts while it was being racist at me even in the main campaign driving mechanics ranked towards the absolute bottom of enjoyability driving was welcome because it was scenic because the world was beautiful so traversing it was exciting in terms of actual controls the vehicles are floating bouncy tin cans of varying durability driving them was fine adequate it was the game world that elevated them now with racing and stunts the primary focus of all game world activities the beautiful landscape becomes a series of brutal obstacles the switchbacking roads that blended so gorgeously into the landscape now become a repetitive series of opportunities to wipe out your car fail your objective and listen again to dialogue such as you're gonna have to go fast if you want to impress me essay more this co-op and squad-oriented game dishes the idea of co-op and the squad you can play with friends but since there's only one driver active in a mission the fun of co-op is much diminished in single player you get no one at all which is massively frustrating when the game makes you do combat focused missions it means no one will revive you if you're down lengthening the amount of time you have to spend in the expansion according to ps4 trophy statistics like 1.2 percent of players have bothered to finish cartel road i'm honestly sad to hear it was so high a number collectively we will never recover the life spent playing the expansion and we've all cheated ourselves out of precious time on this earth on our deathbeds how many will say it all would have been okay if i had only had a little more time and that little more time was the time we spent doing loop-the-loops in a plane to impress a fictional rapper who never ever stopped speaking in rhyme or the time spent stealing a flaming motorcycle for a cannibal biker who just sets himself on fire at the end of the missing chain anyway when i look back on my great regrets joining the 1.2 percent of players who sat through all four courses of this [ __ ] and garbage buffet is going gonna be one of them supposing on i'm unable to smoke the memory away in the next however many years you might think this is more hyperbolic than i usually am maybe that's true but cartel road is in a class of its own when it comes to trash commenters on this site sure don't like it when you flat out call something racist but there's no tiptoeing around it this time like he could hem and haw about the framing and politically acrobatic narrative dodges in the main campaign cartel road takes even those and just chucks them in the [ __ ] bucket the main campaign's over-the-top villains came off as stereotypical true but they were so cartoonish that it was hard to accuse the game of trying to say something here the cartoonishness is blown out even further much further so there's this transition from half-assed stereotype to extreme caricature that doesn't feel playful at all it feels like any caricature to be a deliberately mean-spirited exaggeration the whole premise is insulting as hell the idea that santa blanca in oppressive occupying force in bolivia will win the hearts and minds they lost with all the beatings and the murders if they do enough sick motocross stunts maybe even if they do keep murdering who cares post that [ __ ] on social media and watch the likes roll in it's utterly divorced from human behavior in every way to the point that can't even function satirically in attempting to create over-the-top characters voice actors have leaned into some very iffy accent choices taking bad dialogue and making it worse by filtering it all through the vocal stylings of speedy gonzales the first villain eddie is straightforward enough he's a bro he loves sports he loves stunts he loves it when you do sports and stunts so get out there all the missions are stupid but none of them are especially weird like you gotta protect him from being arrested at one party then fly him to another party and protect him again while he gets his drink on he won't stop calling everyone friendo but i actually almost missed him as i got deeper into the expansion the next guy is literally a crazy cannibal man with a death cult of bikers who are planning to blow up an entire city as a sacrifice to santa marte the skinny lady of death he makes no sense at all he's basically a mad max warlord who kept getting rejected for an actual post-apocalyptic game because he focused tested as too extra then there's tonyo the rapping rhyme man you only have four missions that involve him but they cumulatively add up to an eternity of torture so it feels longer he is every awful vapid rapper cliche rolled into a single package and apparently in the world of wildlands this whole makes him incredibly popular that's what makes the game kind of racist not just having these stereotypical characters but having them be locally respected in the narrative and having the social media point systems just oh yeah people love guys like that down there in bolivia all the rage are they mexican stereotypes or bolivian stereotypes do you think the game would bother to articulate the difference cartel road doesn't care about its setting it doesn't care about its presentation it doesn't even seem to care if you're having a good time or not because almost every mission objective is twitchy and terrible think the flight school missions from gta san andreas but with much more repeating dialogue all of this activity is to get the pda of a criminal mastermind so clever at disguising his identity that folks around here call him el invisible he's the final region's boss the missions there are more traditional like a no inventory prison break but continue the trend of not actually being enjoyable because how is a no inventory prison break fun in an expansion that's already stripped out co-op and is otherwise focused on extreme sports there's one question i can't answer after desperately trying with cartel road and that question is just why who is this for people who liked arcade mode but wished it didn't have any of the fun gameplay mechanics people who loved the tactical light simulational combat and so would therefore also love racing monster trucks people who enjoyed the wide cast of wacky villains but wished they were more actively detestable oh i've got it how about racing game fans who love having their racing be interrupted by awkward combat interludes there's something to be said for developers daring enough to try for cross genre appeal but it takes quite a connected string of preventable failures to arrive at a game that appeals to absolutely no one the most egregious design choice though is the choice to gate the final mission of any given region behind a social media follower threshold higher than you can meet just doing story missions you have to do the side content from formal side missions to extremely tertiary challenges like drifts jumps aerial stunts the side mission i found least annoying was a time trial called ampheta truck where you have to rush a van with a meth lab in the back from one point to another along an obstacle-laden path without blowing the lab up meanwhile another obnoxious fake mexican accent in the back spouts self-consciously wacky dialogue about imaginary llamas or such or how about a side mission where you have to steal a specific kind of vehicle and then for no reason i can determine drive that vehicle very fast to a circle on your mini-map kill everyone in the circle and then put a bug on a crate that supposedly contains a smuggled exotic animal that animal is worth i guess dozens of lives and 76 followers on social media out of the 1200 or so you need to tackle a regional climax did i mention that the followers of each region are non-transferable there's an achievement for getting all available social media points in the expansion and it honestly breaks my [ __ ] heart to think of some poor completionist trying to nail it in a way cartel road is an opportunity to reflect on the things that actually work in the main campaign the base game had redeeming qualities despite its flaws because here we have much of the same game world and many of the same game mechanics but cartel road is the very definition of irredeemable there is no one thing you could change that would make a positive impact it is terrible on every metric wildlands on the other hand charmed me despite itself despite my issues with the storytelling and its worldview the main game's digital tribute to bolivia was something i was able to get well and truly lost in a reason to play all in itself here in cartel road that same landscape is gamified in a way that makes it impossible for me to relate to it dotted as it is with icons and stunt ramps for all of its inconsistencies wildlands is a remarkably singular and memorable open world game it does more right than it does wrong but what it does wrong is so loud that it's impossible to ever completely drown it out where fallen ghosts showed the game tweaked in a way to highlight its tactical variety cartel road is the same game tweaked to follow all its worst impulses to their most extreme conclusions the expansion's climax has l invisible whose identity is known to any player even paying passing attention fooling bowman and tricking her into his installing malware on a secret cia server the ending cinematic suggests that you should just get over the loss no one could have predicted it etc but obviously not even the game believes that because then it immediately cuts to two years later where l invisible is living free on a ranch in arizona so you bust in and you cap his ass and you say something flippant roll credits how's that for closure trials are for schmucks all the cool kids are doing extra judicial justice these days there was never really any pretense that your character was anything but a vessel for mindless violence but neither does a track for a game with tom clency in the title to be so forgetful that warheads like rules and stuff if the main game of wildlands is military fantasy cartel road is like an advertorial partnership between one america news network and mountain dew code red if there had been any lingering thought for me if maybe i'll give breakpoint a try cartel road utterly ruined that for me ever since i played wildlands the base game from that plot by the highway in holbrook three years ago it stuck with me i felt i had unfinished business with the game and i had a strong desire to see its world again i'm cured of that now i think wildlands is an amazing example of both what's uniquely artistic about games and what's uniquely frustrating about them games are a medium where you can make a movingly stunningly evocative world of shadow mist and seemingly endless nature and then you can fill that world with activities that diminish it oily gristle to feed the content mill if you've been stressed and feeling cooped up wildlands can be an amazing tool for getting some of those frustrations out but when it comes to a world increasingly given over to nihilistic absurdism and craven nationalism don't expect wildlands to feel like much of a real escape thanks for watching i want to take this moment to thank some of the people who are donating ten dollars a month or more through the crowdfunding website patreon it's you guys who keep these videos going people like hail period comfy hat alex hansen lay o'neill ethan cossette john paul queller aaron williams andrew hartmann zach millington soybeat eddie burton carroll henderson daniel phillips tyler robinson jeremy mcquade corey beaufil eli bergmas dennis clark jake mays kumar vision nobody world war ii freak alexander leister igor babier lawrence breaking morgan maul brian hill julian renault again jared meyer jen [Music] icr7 thomas culligan ali noir timo bryan barrow cydonia massive wrong ron 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Channel: Noah Caldwell-Gervais

Views: 256,589

Keywords: Wildlands, Ubisoft, Critique, Review, Analysis, Fallen Ghosts, Cartel Road, Tom Clancy, Ghost Recon

Id: hwKjaNHrGIU

Length: 78min 45sec (4725 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 04 2020