Game:

Ghost Recon Wildlands (2017)

Category:

Review

Duration: 10:59

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Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Wildlands is an absurd game with an absurd plot that spans a map so large it encompasses an actual country.The core idea is patently ridiculous: you and three other special operations soldiers, alongside your CIA handler and some friendly rebels, are going to completely wipe out the drug cartel that's taken over the game's fictionalized version of Bolivia. All of Bolivia. You're going to dismantle them piece by pieces across literally every corner of the country and restore its sovereignty. Hoo-ah!That sounds like an absolutely impossible and exhausting exercise. Realistically, it is: Tom Clancy branded games often lean on an impression of realism, like the tense "If you get shot, you're shot" gameplay of the Rainbow Six franchise, using present-day themes and settings to lend a tonal credibility to the adventure. Wildlands tries its damndest to adhere to the tone of the Clancy lineage, but at its heart it's still mechanically a stock-standard Ubisoft open world title, with all the silly artificiality that comes with it. The game is much more committed to pulp and fun than grit and realism, which is to the game’s benefit considering it borrows a real place for its fictional military adventure.Wildlands has already made headlines for receiving a condemnation from the actual real-life Bolivia, who took understandable offense to being portrayed as a cocaine-fueled narco state. Every element of the plot is over-the-top and ridiculous: from the basic setup of your mission, four soldiers against a whole nation, to the individual villains who not only include a standard range of tattooed, mustachioed bad guys but also pop stars, Breaking-Bad-style American scientists, and a skintight-leather wearing former beauty queen. You can also customize your own character, from gender to ethnicity down to the sort of footwear you like to the patches on your backpack. You can make a grey-haired woman with a mohawk and a cowboy hat, and she’ll still fit in among the other characters.In a way, this tonal flippancy makes it easier to get into the spirit of the game than if it had taken itself more seriously.The real star of Ghost Recon: Wildlands isn't the gruff and eternally upbeat heroes or the unending parade of sociopathic villains, it's the map. The landscape is one of the most visually lush and detailed open worlds I've ever seen, even for Ubisoft. Wildlands' world feels like an actual country, with towns in places that make sense, roads that wind along the mountainsides in complex and meandering patterns and buildings with remarkable architecture. The zones don't do hard transitions from one to the next but vary in climate and elevation gradually.This is largely due to scale. In years past, just a quarter of the Wildlands map would have felt positively enormous. I didn't appreciate just how enormous it all was until I got my hands on a helicopter. I flew way up, as high as I could, and looked down on a world of mountains, rivers, citie
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Source: https://www.polygon.com/2017/3/6/14835222/pre-review-ghost-recon-wildlands-xbox-one-pc-ps4

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