Ghost Recon: Future Soldier review

METAL GHOST SOLID

With your team hidden from view and your enemies tagged and tracked, you’re now ready to move in. You can choose any target and assign one your four team mates to it. In single player, that squad mate will move to get his weapon trained, and then await your orders. Up to four enemies can be tagged in this way, with you taking on the fourth yourself, at your command, or on your shot, your team mates will drop their targets simultaneously. It’s this powerful ‘Sync Shot’ that is your main weapon, and the game then sets out to provide almost puzzle-like scenarios for you to solve with it.

Sometimes five enemies will be present in a particular area, requiring you to take out two yourself in quick succession, before the alarm is raised and reinforcements called, or the mission declared over. Alternatively, you can sneak in amongst them and take them out with your knife. Or choose to sit back, controlling the drone and just selecting targets to be picked off, get the order and the timing right and your team can sweep through an area without hassle.

Your team are incredibly efficient in single player, never risking detection and always taking their assigned man in short order. Multiplayer is a totally different matter, and you’ll need to play with co-operative types or else chaos will quickly ensue.

KICKING OFF

When it does all kick off, the game handles itself well, but not brilliantly. Ghost Recon is a third-person shooter, which fits its stealth-heavy, cover-to-cover gameplay better. Shooting then is a two-part process, with shouldering the gun for general shooting and looking down the scope activated separately. This makes it much harder to run-and-gun with any accuracy.

The guns lack the look, noise and feel of handling Call of Duty’s armoury; they are effective, but pulling the trigger doesn’t give you quite the same macho thrill. In terms of its third-person cover-based gameplay, your soldier doesn’t feel as athletic, or move as confidently as those in say Gears of War. There’s still fun to be had in a big shoot-out but the stealth-based stuff is simply more satisfying.

A good option is to sit back with a sniper rifle or light machine gun and direct your teammates fire from relative safety. You can quickly direct your men to concentrate fire on certain targets, and selecting the right ones can quickly turn the tide.

SURFACE TENSIONS

Those who have come from Call of Duty could also criticise the game for a lack of graphical polish. And yes, there are some bland environments and dull-looking textures. However, though far from a sandbox, the levels do have far more open space than Call of Duty’s, with the option to approach some objectives as you please. There are also impressive changes in environments, from fighting through a snow storm with zero visibility -accompanied by a walking, armoured support gun – to a car-to-car gunfight in a big city with civilians running through your line of fire the whole time.

If you’re buying the game on the PC then it’s worth noting that it’s essentially a direct port of the console versions, with no extra bells or whistles. It certainly doesn’t push things from a graphical perspective. Plus you’ll need a constant internet connection to satisfy Ubisoft’s copy protection system.

CONCLUSION

If you enjoy both Splinter Cell and Call of Duty then this hybrid of the two is bound to appeal. It may lack a little of the bombast of the best shooters, but Ghost Recon has a far wider array of gameplay than many of its competitors. By eschewing realism, it allows for all those gizmos, that paired with a capable stealth-based mechanic, create a more-measured, more cerebral challenge. If you have similarly-minded friends to enjoy it with, then all the better.