The Breaking Point Of Patience

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Breakpoint

byTim Augustin (GameAxis)

Ghost Recon: Breakpoint’s story begins with Nomad and a team of Ghost Recon soldiers deploying to the island of Auroa. Nomad and her squadmates get shot down over the island, immediately learning that former Ghost Cole D. Walker has taken it over with his army of ‘Wolves’.

Stuck without backup and proper equipment, Nomad has to liberate the island and its citizens of their newfound dictators, and find out what exactly the Wolves are after. This is the beginning of the game, and unfortunately is justabout as interesting as it will ever get.

After this, Breakpoint’s story missions feel unnecessarily stretched out, existing to simplyextend the game’s runtime or to provide equipment forplayers to level up their gear score (we’ll get into that later). Quests and side-quests revolve around you going to a part of the map, finding an enemy base, getting information or rescuing someone, and getting out. Bases are sloppily put together as well, with clearly cut-and-paste buildings all over the entire map. That’s as good as Auroa’s world design gets, too.

Thus, the story never actually feels interesting enough to invest in. There’s a way to do shooter campaigns right, and most developers realise that it’s not by repeatedly throwing players into the same room with the same enemies again and again.

Ghost Recon: Breakpoint never has any standout moments even withJon Bernthaldoing his best at portraying the villainous Walker. But even Bernthal isn’t capable of lifting this game’s story beyond anything dull and generic, especially when he barely appears in the game besides in hamfisted flashbacks.

I am actually appalled that Ubisoft decided to release Ghost Recon: Breakpoint in this state, and that’s after the Day One Patch that supposedly flxes many of its issues. I played this game before, during and after release and let me assure you - it is still a broken game.

I encountered all manner of fun bugs and glitches, including but not limited to; limbs randomly separating from NPC’s bodies, Nomad holding invisible guns, lighting glitches, audio issues, bad texture popins and enemies that see through walls. My personal favourite was when I somehow broke the entire game’s day-and-night cycle, leading to the sun and moon hurtling through Auroa’s sky at a hundred miles an hour... forever.

Enemy AI is hilariously dumb and/or broken, depending on how lucky you are. If you throw a grenade, enemies will stare at it until it explodes. If they see you run behind a wall, you will have magically vanished in their eyes. Sometimes, they just give up and walk in circles.

Character animations and voice acting are hilariously terrible; Nomad and Walker are exceptions, with good-enough facial and character animations. Other characters walk and talk like planks of wood.

The company actually has a great reputation for flxing their games post-release, so I have no doubt that this one will be playable with at least 70% less issues in maybe a year or two.

Ghost Recon: Breakpoint’s gameplay loop of eliminating enemies (with an admittedly fun variety of weaponry) is fun enough for the first couple hours. Eventually however, RPG mechanics and pesky robots caused my patience with this game to wear thin.

First of all, adding RPG mechanics to this game makes it feel more or less like a spin-oﬀ of Ubisoft’s own Division games, rather than an actual Ghost Recon sequel. These mechanics didn’t make sense in games like Far Cry: New Dawn or Wolfenstein: Youngblood earlier this year, and they certainly don’t make sense here. Levelgating prevents you from entering certain areas until you have a high enough gear score.

Your gear score is the average level of all your weapons and equipment, so you’ll constantly have to scavenge for higher level stuﬀ just to progress even if you already have a gun you like.

Now, it’s true that one headshot will always take down all human enemies, but this game doesn’t have ONLY human enemies. During story missions, you’ll often be tasked with infiltrating bases that have drones and small tanks guarding them. These robots are straight up bullet sponges, soaking up all your grenades, rockets and bullets UNLESS you have a gear score that’s up to par with the area.

Ghost Recon: Breakpoint isn’t even close to being a good, worthwhile or even functional game at its $79.90 price point. It’s a broken, unfinished mess that doesn’t even have a story or world worth exploring, for however humongous Auroa is.