Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Wildlands | Review | Let's Go On A Dull Vacation In Bolivia
9Let’s talk about open world games for a second.
Even though they’ve been around for almost as long as games have, the real style of open world as we know it today didn’t come into vogue until the past ten or fifteen years. The Elder Scrolls, Grand Theft Auto: those worlds that you could get lost in, playing tourist to cities and landscapes that never existed. In recent years, they’ve become the norm for a lot of AAA titles, and most people agree that that’s made them fall off in quality a bit. Just because you can make a huge world, doesn’t mean you can make it interesting, after all. Just take Montana, for example: that place is huge, and it’s got, like, tops: 3 dragons.
But it’s not all bad. I see open world games sort of like pizza. Big, sprawling, and able to accommodate a number of tastes: and even when it’s bad, it isn’t terrible. Even the shittiest pizza is something you can get the most of your money out of, and if a $60 AAA release is all you’ll be able to afford for quite some time, an open world game will at least keep you busy til the next one comes around.
But what happens when the missions and hours you can spend are all the same, and fairly dull? What do you do when the pizza you’re going to live on for the weekend looks good, but is mostly made of crust? What do you do when your game is… crusty? Wow, that was terrible.
Look, I’m talking about Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands.
While the layout and visuals of Wildlands might be some of the best of the year, it’s just beautiful gift wrap over the same three presents over and over again. And the presents aren’t even that great: unless you like face tattoos.
Ghost Recon: Wildlands essentially plays like this: you’re a member of your standard tough-guy elite team of top secret soldiers who have been dropped into Bolivia to enact Operation: Kingslayer. Your mission is to destroy the Santa Blanca cartel: a Mexican led drug operation that has taken over a significant portion of Bolivia, essentially turning it into it’s own cocaine fuelled sovereign nation. And while that sounds like a lot of fun to people like Rockso the Clown, everyone else is suffering, so you’ve gotta get in there and take down the cartel: lieutenant by lieutenant, until you finally get enough intel to take down Chapo Tattooface over here.
This game made me think very heavily of two other games.
The first one is obvious: Grand Theft Auto. Like GTA, the Bolivian landscape that you’re surrounded by is enormous, and you’ll find yourself commandeering one disposable vehicle after another to speed down roads, cover rivers, and fly over mountains. The difference between the GTA world and the faux-Bolivia represented here, though, is that… Well… Bolivia isn’t fun. Wildlands takes itself really seriously, which is fine. But that makes the huge world that they’ve created an absolute slog to get through. You’re not going to meet a lot of methed-out wacky characters who say funny things and have bizarre requests. You’re not going to go on missions beyond shooting a guy, interrogating a guy, or stealing a vehicle. And when you do get to steal a vehicle, you’re dealing with one impoverished South American town after another, so you’re not exactly going to find a huge variety of hot rods and impressive rides. And when you do find that impressive ride, you’ve still got to drive several kilometers to the next mission while listening to the worst radio imaginable. There were times in Grand Theft Auto 5 that I had to drive way out to the sticks for one reason or another, but it didn’t bother me because I was in a Lamborghini listening to Bootsy Collins. So Wildlands is indeed a huge world, but the stuff you get to do in that world is minimal at best. I’m not trying to suggest that a gritty military game needs a ton of weirdo characters like Rockstar does.
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