2017's Ghost Recon Wildlands is a gloriously chaotic shooter that's more than the sum of its parts

Though I have clocked up several dozen hours in Ghost Recon Wildlands, 2017’s open-world military shooter, it’s taken till now to notice that I hadn’t finished its first mission. Instead, I’ve fought the cartel sponging off Bolivia haphazardly, daisy-chaining disconnected missions together with the odd opportunity to kidnap a henchman and raid a hacienda, inviting mishap en route.

Chaos spirals quickly in the Wildlands. I only wanted to commandeer a convoy when my helicopter was shot down. Next, the minibus I hijacked was made undriveable by a road accident. The town I then entered to pump a random guy for secrets became a battleground when he pulled a gun on me, inspiring me to call in rebel reinforcements (and a mortar bombardment, why not?). Our helicopter escape crossed paths with another convoy, whose leader I kidnapped, drove away and interrogated. This unexpectedly fulfilled a task, leading to the location of a commander whose death marked the completion of a main mission I have no memory of ever instigating. A true deniable op.

Wildlands is a sequel in the tactical, squad-based Ghost Recon series which began in 2001. Typically, you issue movement and engagement commands to your team and use fancy gadgets. Wildlands is a bit different. Its creators identified the fun thing about the series—using your wits and gadgetry to navigate a hostile environment, to better attack the enemies therein—and built a sprawling world around it.

Bad company

The first missions Wildlands assigns you, which I originally absent-mindedly walked away from, don’t just offer a taste of the game. They are the game. They have us stealthily approaching targets, rescuing a man, stealing a car, hacking computers and finally bearing down on the local bigwigs at their hunting lodge. You’re equipped with a small armoury, night-vision, a drone and binoculars, and a Sync Shot ability to simultaneously shoot targets with your AI squadmates. In the course of these tasks, you’ll be reconnoitring, quietly dispatching, loudly raiding, and making helicopter getaways. Listen: my patience for wordy tutorials and massive skill trees are stretched thin. What joy, then, when the fruits of a game are offered to you in the first 15 minutes.

What makes Wildlands dazzle in regular diversions can, however, make it tough company over a longer duration. Its missions and targets lack variety. Its stealth is not particularly involved. Wildlands’ novel structure, letting you take on region bosses in the order you see fit, has little bearing on the game’s progression. More fatally, as an inheritor of Far Cry 3’s obsession with clearing outposts and marking enemies, and of Assassin’s Creed’s fondness for surveillance birds and a minimap chockablock with icons, Wildlands’ playbook of tech and tactics quickly slot into familiar routines.

And yet the chimeric Wildlands proves better than the sum of its parts. Having seen its tricks, I haven’t moved on. One idea of Wildland’s worth keeping around is the idea of extracting ‘intel’ from lieutenants. These are miscellaneous NPCs who drive around innocuously until they are T-boned from a mountain hairpin, pulled from the wreckage and interrogated. In gratitude for the adventure, they mark a set of collectibles in the locality on your map.

Going out and acquiring these collectibles—side-missions, weapon cases, or skill points—generally improves your situation in the game, bringing forth new weapons and providing the resources to improve your abilities. Abilities like thermal vision (cool but inessential), enhanced damage to vehicles (handy), and a skill that makes your AI squad-mates less embarrassing (vital). The contents of weapon cases are not disguised on the map, making some (folded buttstocks, anyone?) easy to ignore. This refreshingly diminishes the sense of FOMO that other games intensify. Moreover, you are kitted out, more or less, from the get-go.

Tom Clancy's HAWX

Hard to ignore is the hawkish Tom Clancy-ness of it all. You are Nomad, leader of an American special forces team fighting to effect regime change in a Latin American country. Have you heard this one before? In the helicopter ride in at the game’s outset, CIA spy Karen Bowman sets out the game’s unconvincing revenge arc. The Ghosts are in Bolivia for cartel boss El Sueño, and to help local rebels wedged between his Santa Blanca faction and the corrupt state forces La Unidad. You see, El Sueño killed an undercover American embroiled in foreign affairs, and that’s ruffled our feathers. This isn’t WWIII we’re trying to avert here. It’s a side-plot in the war on drugs.

If this doesn’t push your buttons, they work for your uncomplicated protagonist, whose naff patriotic rejoinders are delivered with bland solemnity. “Sometimes I think about the bad things we do for the good of our country,” Nomad soliloquises, uninvited, at some point. “I’d do it all again. In a heartbeat.” Great! But I do wish you’d stop saying this out of my avatar’s mouth.

Wildlands’ version of Bolivia is a fabulously inviting depiction of a landscape, whose physical environments are enchanting enough to keep you exploring. Atmospheric effects shepherd changes in mood and the chirps of biome-specific creatures help plant your feet in the virtual soil. It is also a bombastic caricature of a country more at home in the Just Cause games, which have the grace to fictionalise their settings.

Ubisoft abstracts real places into games all the time, usually with the tactful application of historical distance. But there’s something odd about how Wildlands thugs outnumber its non-combatants. Where regular people appear, they are quaking or fleeing or otherwise lingering in a town, unbothered by the presence of American soldiers. The decorating of interchangeable settlements with gruesome corpse displays is also worryingly unremarked upon, not least by locals taking the air. Any residual sincerity is undercut by the armed helicopters all over the place, flashing notifications of “UNIDAD PATROL NEARBY” and the suspicion that your explosive conduct must surely be more a hindrance to local people than a help. The game Ubisoft made, between the caricature and the self-serious chauvinism, is confusingly cartoonish.

Mission fail

On a tactical level, there is enough to keep you busy. Just enough thinking around a problem is required to accomplish your goals. Can’t enter a gate? Parachute in. Anti-aircraft nearby? Blow it up first. Compound is alarmed? Shoot its power box. Your surveillance gadgets mean it’s normally easy to evade guards. But they’ll investigate a gunshot, and an alert will ring out on a discovered body. When you’re spotted, it’s time to embrace the mayhem.

When Wildlands forces stealth rules, it’s a mission fail. A mission released as an update links you up with Tom Clancy franchise stablemate Sam Fisher, alias Mr. Splinter Cell. You must rendezvous inside an enemy base between 9pm and 4am, without being spotted or killing anybody.

My first attempt is foiled while trying to crawl under a trailer. On my second attempt I’m casing the joint when my squadmate cries, “We got a man down!” He walked into a speeding train. The third attempt fails because I leave the mission area, which I dispute, and the fourth fails after I’m spotted by a guard before I can grab him. Finally on my fifth attempt I go through a gap in a fence, obviously a prescribed route, and find Sam as he triggers a massive armed response by hacking a laptop. I hold off the attack until an escape is possible through the jungle towards a hijacked car. Devastatingly, I turn to see a helicopter shooting rockets not at me, but at Sam, still plodding through the base to my getaway point.

This is no meticulous espionage simulation. It doesn’t have much resemblance to reality, nor a story worth sticking around for. I’m here for the moment plans slide into chaos, and I know Wildlands has that in abundance.