Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Breakpoint
Platform: UPLAY
My Game Time: 12 Hours
Released: October 2019
Game Description: Become a Ghost, an Elite US Special Operations soldier, as you fight to survive against your brothers who have turned against you.
Features
-Put yourself in the shoes of a Spec Ops soldier stranded behind enemy lines as you explore the massive open world.
-Create your own play style with a huge variety of classes, weapons, and equipment.
-Maintain all of your progress and rewards however you play, from solo to co-op or even PvP.
My Summary: A confusing mess of a game that under delivers in almost every aspect, essentially an online shop for gamers to throw away their hard earned cash to buy completion of the game. Decent graphics and the occasional fun firefight cannot save this dismal effort from UBISOFT
So I decided to jump into this game at release and having not played any Tom Clancy games for awhile I was rather excited to get started. I had heard that Wildlands was flawed but still a good game nonetheless and was expecting UBISOFT to improve upon their last game. The game opened up into some pretty interesting menus and the amount of options available for customising the game and graphics was very impressive. Then I actually decided to play the game and all that was ruined!
The game started with a cut scene, for some reason this quickly lost me and I was bored within the first few minutes of this mind numbing story. Then my guy had a horrific helicopter crash and was in quite a bad way, needing some urgent medical attention and being barely able to move. Here the frustration began, the game gave no clues on how to patch up my character. So I spent the first 20 minutes of the game limping very slowly towards waypoints and avoiding enemies. Eventually I fired up Google and found that I was able to heal, the game never explained the mechanics of how I could do this or even suggested that I was capable of it with my current gear. I didn't even realise I had the bandages on me to heal until I checked the clumsy menu. Then the frustration continued as I tried every combination of buttons to apply the first aid bandage. A couple of boring cut scenes later and I was healed and decided to engage in a firefight. This was actually quite fun and taking out my first 2 opponents I decided id been to quick to judge the game. Then I ran into a load more enemies and realised that the AI in this game is atrocious, they just run at you while you shoot them in the head. No tactics, no diving for cover, no ability to even seek help. They just run head first into your bullets and die!
This was a great shame as the actual gun play was reasonably fun and I was not that critical of the cover system finding it dynamic (if a little frustrating). I made my way to the first hub and was met with endless boring dialogue and some more cut scenes that were beginning to make me lose the will to live. The camp then connected to other players and tried to jump me into a mission I was not ready for in the campaign. I spent much of this time confused as to actually what was going on in the game and whether I was playing with others or not?! At one point a drone showed up detected me and proceeded to just murder my character before I knew what had happened. I have heard that this is a common occurrence within the game and has left many frustrated. Enemies will just spawn out of nowhere and kill your character if you are detected, this makes the harder difficulties almost impossible to play.
I jumped into the multiplayer battle mode looking for something fun to do and did have a memorable battle in a 4 v 4 match. I got a good kill and was enjoying it but the game was over far to quick and in the subsequent match my allies just failed to revive me and carried on playing solo. This cost us the match and I quit again in frustration. This seems to be the overarching theme of the game and its poor design. The graphics do look good yet seem a lot more demanding on my rig than they should be and the wind is constantly blowing which makes the grass look slightly odd (the effect is very distracting). The gun sounds were sufficient but nothing special but this didn't really matter as I was to busy being frustrated by the mechanics of the game!
While you can collect gear in the game (its rather to plentiful and forces you to change your gun every few minutes) you are also able to access a shop where you can essentially buy all the gear in the game. This breaks the game and leaves it utterly pointless. Why buy a game where you can just bypass any sort of progression by buying all the best gear? None of this makes any sense and it simply destroys the game turning it into one massive shop for micro transactions.
Avoid this mess at all costs. Overpriced and poorly designed. The game is essentially one big shop with very little substance and I predict this will be one of the biggest flops of the year, even the mainstream gaming media seem to recognise its flaws. PC Gamer stated it was a "tedious and confused open-world tactical shooter" and that "poorly stapled-on mechanics and a general lack of polish make Breakpoint's open-world tactics simply not worth the time". This is clearly one of the worst games of 2019 I am sure! Time to uninstall and spare up some of my precious hard drive space for some actual good games. UBISOFT you really messed this one up.
Review Score: 25/100
I have decided to switch to scoring games out of 100 as it allows me some more flexibility in my approach. If you enjoyed this review please get behind it with your up votes which will enable me to produce more content. Please comment with any games you would like to see reviewed next!
Lrev