Ghost recon 1 demo free#
It’s a tall order, then, but the entire map is accessible from the start and you’re completely free to tackle the bosses in whichever order you see fit, a five point difficulty offering rough guidance as to the challenge you’ll face. That equates to well over 100 campaign levels alone – and this being an Ubisoft game, there are also dozens of side missions to complete and collectibles to uncover, most of which increase the combat capabilities of the rebel forces fighting by your side. To give a sense of the scale of the challenge ahead, each buchon (the game practically fetishises Latino slang) rules their own zone of the map and players must discover pieces of intel to unlock the five story missions that will eventually reveal their target’s whereabouts. Each of the organisation’s two dozen underbosses has their own distinct dysfunctional personality and dedicated backstory, and there’s enough wit in the writing to elevate the stereotypical playboys and peasants-made-bad into if not three- then at least two-dimensional characters. Ghost Recon at least does a good job of making light of this state-sponsored genocide. You take on the role of an elite US soldier sent in undercover and off the books to destabilise the drug runners by murdering them in their thousands. In this near future nightmare scenario Bolivia has been transformed into a narco-state run by the all-powerful Santa Blanca cartel headed up by the heavily-tattooed jefe, El Sueno – a representation, by the way, that has sparked a real-world diplomatic incident between Bolivia and Ubisoft’s home country, France. A chance for players to live out their hardline Republican fantasies largely unencumbered by law or morality (killing civilians will theoretically cause missions to fail but the developers have built in plenty of leeway). Which, of course, is essentially what it is. Instead of a living, breathing country, Wildlands feel like Westworld for the Guns & Ammo crowd. Clutches of civilians go about their daily routines but they’re invariably outnumbered by brazenly armed bad guys and don’t seem unduly bothered by the warfare being waged around them, occasionally cowering in terror but more often just strolling on past. Despite the painstaking attention to environmental design detail there’s still an unshakeable air of artificiality. Hotwiring a helicopter and heading out over its imperious peaks and seemingly endless salt flats proves a genuine joyride. It’s easy to become blase about expansive environments in this era of incredible open worlds but Wildlands still manages to take your breath away on a regular basis. Or rather miles - the virtual Bolivia they’ve created is enormous, encompassing over a dozen different types of terrain and making GTA V’s Los Santos feel like a shanty town in comparison. Ubisoft’s obsession with open worlds borders on an addiction itself – it’s surely only a mater of time before their rhythm action franchise Just Dance is relocated to a sandbox night club the size of the city of Sheffield - but they’ve really gone the extra mile here. This is an extraordinarily large game that will take months to complete. In truth, overlong is perhaps selling Wildlands short.
F ittingly for a game centred around cocaine production and the drug trade’s transformative effects on society, Ghost Recon Wildlands bears an uncanny resemblance to the deluge of double albums fuelled by the stuff in the 1970s: self-indulgent and overlong but with enough moments of quality buried within to just about excuse the whole endeavour.