Multiplayer:
Clearly, this is a game designed to be played co-op, and the game offers you multiple ways to team up or fight against each other through the hub. Co-op is certainly a different experience to Wildlands, which was quite an easy game to solo thanks to the very capable AI, who are completely gone from this game.
The hub always seems crowded, and it’s not hard to join up with people, although it does all seem rather disjointed from the story, which is more of a personal revenge tale. Anyway, story disconnects aside, you’re unlikely to get any actual disconnects in game, as everything works rather tidily in my opinion.
Presentation:
Aurora is an impressive looking island chain; as a map it will take you a good 10-15 minutes just to fly from one end to the other, the scale is truly impressive. It’s a generally good looking place to explore too, with lush jungle covering much of the map, but also huge military encampments, villages and towns which change up the variety and keep things interesting. It does start to go downhill from there though. I found that your player character looks a significant step below NPCs, with weirdly dead eyes, a lack of expression in general, and even the NPCs themselves aren’t great, with janky, jerky animations and some pretty horrific facial expressions. Thankfully, the in-engine cut-scenes can be skipped if needed, and they aren’t so frequent as to break the experience.
Having said that, the voice acting is also pretty poor, with the male lead sounding impossibly gravelly to the point that any empathy in the script is lost or comes across hilariously off kilter. Thankfully, again, the rest of the sound is not quite such a disaster, with excellent sound effects and ambients.
Conclusion:
“Ghost Recon: Breakpoint” isn’t the car crash some other outlets are describing it as. There’s a huge, well-realised island to discover, and the free-form mission structure is genuinely interesting and fairly innovative. But the game stumbles under the weight of its own mechanics. Are you trying to level? Or get better gear? Or get coins? Or complete missions? Getting faction rep? Or complete gun/ class objectives? It’s never really clear what the best and most efficient way of progressing is (and this is perhaps deliberate!).
Still, the scope, scale and amount of content is impressive, and if you can get over the too-complex systems, coins, battle passes and other extraneous bull that should have been left on the cutting room floor, the core stealth, shooting and exploration mechanics of the game are genuinely fun and worth checking out.
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