Ghost Recon Breakpoint review – surviving games a service

Ubisoft’s latest open world Tom Clancy game has plenty of Ghost Recon’s usual co-op action, but also lots and lots of microtransactions…

To an even greater extent than other Ubisoft franchises, Ghost Recon has been through considerable change over the course of its nearly 20-year history. It’s always been a military simulation featuring soldiers from the near future, and you’ve always had a squad of four highly trained special forces operators at your disposal, but what started as a relatively dry tactical shooter has had increasing amounts of rough and ready personality injected into it.

Something borrowed, something new

To help underline that sense of vulnerability, Breakpoint borrows Far Cry’s healing system, with either instant, limited-use magic syringes or infinite but slower-to-use bandages tidying up injuries too severe to auto-heal. It doesn’t make all that much difference in practice, but it does set the scene for a lot more borrowing from other Ubisoft stablemates, most notably The Division 2, which provides the underlying structure for the game and the impetus to keep playing.

Like The Division, Ghost Recon is now a looter shooter, your gear score having the most powerful effect on which enemies and missions you’re able to take on, each one graded with a minimum level. While in past games you’d settle on a loadout suited to your play style, or occasionally the mission in hand, now you’re caught up in a never-ending rush to ratchet up the gear score. No matter how good your rifle is, it will only ever be minutes before it’s sold or dismantled for spare parts.

The issue here is that unlike The Division, with its inexplicably bullet-spongey players who can take 30 machinegun bullets to the face and still be absolutely fine, in Ghost Recon a single headshot (or two for helmet-wearing heavies) is enough to kill absolutely anyone using any weapon, which makes the continual search for slightly better guns only relevant when taking out the big land-based drones.

Breakpoint’s other attempts to cannibalism Ubisoft’s back catalogue is more successful though. Taking a cue from Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, you can choose to play in exploration mode, which turns off the intrusive HUD, leaving you to find mission objectives using clues and a map. It’s a feature that’s just as compelling as it was in Ancient Greece, and although it makes everything take a lot longer, the sense of immersion and being at one with the rugged countryside is well worth the extra slog.

Breakpoint also features a The Division style hub area where you can shop, join teams of fellow players, and chat to non-player characters to progress mission objectives. The crowds of fellow Ghosts do rather undermine the idea that you’re stranded and alone, but then quite a lot of things conspire to smash the game’s tone and atmosphere to a pulp, the worst of which is the voice-acting.

For some reason every single voice, no matter where you hear it, from tropical rainstorm to swamp to vast cavern, sounds as though it was recorded in a small, echoey room. It’s hugely disconcerting, but it gets worse because apart from Walker – played by The Walking Dead’s Jon Bernthal, who’s consistently and entertainingly evil throughout – most of the other Ghosts, civilians, and baddies deliver their lines in a kind of listless monotone.

The script is similarly baffling in its dreadfulness. ‘I’ve been analysing these test results for hours’, says a computer scientist. Nomad’s reply, ‘What are you trying to achieve, abstract art?’ It’s exchanges like these that perfectly encapsulate the game’s jarringly confused tone. On the one hand it’s meant to be an ultra-realistic military simulation, on the other, a change of hat can make you a more powerful soldier.

Pay to level-up

The focus on gear score also renders large parts of the game’s interface all but irrelevant. Why spend time and resources upgrading a weapon, buying attachments, and giving it a natty paint job when you’ll be using a completely different and incompatible gun five minutes later? It makes those systems feel redundant, a sense that’s particularly galling when you discover the huge range and variety of bugs – which at this point are also a Ubisoft staple.

Characters jump about in cut scenes; sunlight filters through gaps in the wall of a cave deep underground; rocks have scenery visible inside them; your soldier appears with his hands gripping an invisible weapon, his finger exercising proper trigger discipline in thin air; story completion rests at 0% when you’ve just finished Act 3; the screen frequently freezes; there’s stuttering audio in conversations; and sometimes all your operator’s customised gear disappears during cut scenes.

Those aren’t the only issues. For a game so relentlessly based on swapping out equipment, there’s no way to mark or group select kit you want to sell or dismantle, leaving you with minutes of repeatedly choosing an item, holding down a button, choosing another item, and holding down another button. It’s the sort of thing that absolutely must have come up during play-testing, and is a baked-in feature of The Division 2, but conspicuous by its absence here, amidst a menu system that might charitably be called a rat’s nest.

There’s also the comedy-grade catalogue of microtransactional content, of which the season passes are only the start. The game is so desperate for you to spend more money it tries to tempt you into buying sets of rifles, scopes, handguns, attachments, gun blueprints, melee weapons, and even skill points. Yes, you can buy skill points to save you from the bother of actually having to play the game. And while you can earn plenty of weapons and upgrades in-game, some are firmly locked behind paywalls, a sharp slap in the face when you’ve already paid circa £60 to be there in the first place.

There are welcome changes too, though. With no actual nations involved, there’s none of Wildlands’ jingoism. It’s also less focused on the masturbatory worship of military hardware; it’s still all about guns, body armour, and tactical trousers, but the looter shooter gear rush means you never have any piece of kit long enough to develop a fetishistic attachment to it. It will still be catnip to those who enjoy playing milsim Barbie dress-up, but it’s hard to imagine that faction being in the majority.

Behind all the glitches, contradictions, and hard sell, there are excellent moments of gaming to be had as you silently take out guards on a high-tech fortress, sneak into a heavily guarded base to hack a computer without being spotted, or simply trot through the woods picking off patrols for sport, whether solo or with friends. It’s engaging and does genuinely have its own distinct feel compared with past outings in the series.