Ghost Recon: Wildlands - The War on Drugs!

By Sam Coles:  

Open world and Ubisoft are usually met with the same reaction if you were to say chicken nuggets dipped in milkshake, usually a few coughs mixed with a bit of vomit. Anyway, oddly specific and vulgar analogy aside people seem to hate Ubisoft games before they have played them and to be honest, I don’t understand why, they are mostly harmless and rather engaging games. Are the innovative? No, but not everything in gaming has to push boundaries they are there to present a good world and story no matter how complex they are. So, Ghost Recon: Wildlands, a game that I played all the way through on Xbox Game Pass recently and it was a blast!  

Ghost Recon: Wildlands takes place in Bolivia, where you play as the titular Ghosts who are tasked with taking down a local drug cartel called Santa Blanca. It’s not a particular engaging narrative, it gives you a thin layer of context for the chaos you are about to cause within South America. If you are thinking “Wow, this has a Narcos vibe”, then you would be right as it was released right at the height of the Netflix show’s popularity, which makes sense with its themes.  

Anyway, the story is not the reason why we play this game it is the gameplay! I have to say, when Ubisoft first said they are making Ghost Recon an open world game I wasn’t sure but it makes sense if you go back to the series routes. The Ghost Recon games were an evolution of the old Rainbow Six games, similar gameplay however they took place outside in wide open spaces. The more I thought about it and when I finally played it, it clicks as an open world game where you can tackle objectives in any order you want with a variety of gadgets and weapons.  

With a brief introduction the game will dump you in the open world, explaining the bosses and sub-bosses you can take down, in order to get to the leader of the cartel. It is a completely free form experience; you can do the main objectives taking down the sub-bosses or you can go around the open world causing havoc as you do your bit for the war on drugs.  

The game does motivate you to take each mission in a stealth manner, but if I am given the option to strap a grenade launcher to the underbarrel of my M4, what do you think I am going to do? The answer is, blow everything up in sight because of course it is! However, that is the beauty of Ghost Recon Wildlands, it doesn’t penalise you for going loud but it will make encounters harder, with reinforcements among other things. There are only a handful times where the game expects you to do a mission without detection, but those moments are minimal.  

What I like about the gameplay is that you can fully customise your loadout, as this brings back the gunsmith system from Future Soldier. With this system you can customise your weapon to your heart’s desire, from the buttstock all the way down to the trigger with a satisfying animation that takes the gun apart to show the inner workings. It is a gun nut’s wet dream this system.  

You can also fully customise your operator’s appearance, you can make your appearance as serious or silly as you want. You can look like a fully equipped marine or a caricature of the average American, but I digress.  It is fun to play dress up with your character, and plus you can unlock more clothing options the more side missions you do, same applies to weapons and attachments.  

Visually this game looks fantastic, it is hard to believe this game came out in 2017 but here we are and it still looks beautiful. The environments look absolutely stunning and they are varied too, from the lush and humid jungles to the salt flats you can drive as fast as you can. Something this game does not lack is variety with its environments, I will never tire flying over the map in a helicopter as I witness the sun set on the coke fueled countryside.  

Ghost Recon Wildlands is a fun open world game, it is fun to explore Bolivia and get up to no good as you blow stuff up all in the name of the “War on Drugs”. It is super cheap these days, so it is a no brainer to pick it up if you are looking for a great open world game to sink your teeth into.