GHOST RECON: WILDLANDS CAMPAIGN REVIEW

TOM CLANCY’S GHOST RECON: WILDLANDS GAMEPLAY

This game is designed to test the tactical and shooting skills of the gamer. The game is set in an open world environment. It is a third-person shooter game with an optional first-person view for aiming. We get to play as a member of Delta Company, First Battalion, 5^th Special Forces group, also known as “Ghosts”. “Ghosts” is a fictional elite special operations unit of the United States Army under the Joint Special Operation Command. This game is not set in the future like Ghost Recon Advance Warfighter and Future Soldier instead it is set up in a Modern Warfare environment which is why the players can use equipment and weapons used by military forces all over the world at this period of time. Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon franchise has signature equipment – The Drone. The drone in this game can be upgraded to add better features like extended battery life, thermal vision, night vision, etc. The games also provide us with a variety of vehicles such as dirt bikes, helicopters, dune buggies, different types of cars, etc. You can ride any vehicle you like.

This place is not as scary as it looks.

I personally preferred driving a 4-seater car so that all my teammates ride with me because sometimes when we ride in different vehicles our teammates don’t reach the combat zone in time to provide us support. There is this funny thing in the game related to vehicles. When you will sit in a vehicle, your teammates will start entering the vehicle one by one but if you will not let them sit and start moving before they sit then the other teammates will be automatically teleported to the vehicle.

Looking at my own shadow for no reason.

There are many interesting side missions too in the game which is a new feature in Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon games. In the campaign mode, players can reach their mission location in various ways. You can do a parachute landing on the location or you can drive towards the objective. Players are also allowed to carry out the mission in their own way like if you prefer stealth then you can carry out the mission at night with suppressed weapons and melee combat, if you like chaos then you can use LMGs and grenades, if you like to keep a distance from the enemy then you can snipe your target. I like sniping the target as it is safer, easy, and cool. Players can also use enemies as human shields. While using a human shield player can also shoot other enemies.

The character you choose can be customized. You can select your own looks, clothes, loadout, tatoo, etc. The gears and pieces of equipment can be upgraded. According to the creative director of the game, the AI of the game is unscripted and has their “own motivations and agendas”. Well, that’s creepy.

There are 21 areas in the game. Each area is controlled by a Buchon, who is associated with one of the four divisions of the Santa Marina Drug Cartel. The four divisions of drug cartel are Influence, Security, Production and Smuggling. As the names suggest Influence division carries out operations which increase the influence of the leader of the drug cartel in the area, Security division takes care of the security issues of the drug cartel, Production division work is to produce drugs and the Smuggling division handles the smuggling of the drugs around the globe. The Ghost team has to take down all of these divisions by killing or capturing their head to get to the leader of the drug cartel. To kill or capture the Buchon the ghost team starts from the bottom, killing and capturing the people working under Buchons to make them come out of their hiding. Killing or capturing the buchons make the boss vulnerable.

To be honest, at the beginning of the game I thought that the cartel boss was really very powerful and intelligent but when I actually get to encounter him, I felt that he was easier to kill/capture than the buchons.

TOM CLANCY’S GHOST RECON STORYLINE.

The timeline of the game is set in Bolivia in July 2019. Bolivia was becoming unstable day by day due to a Mexican Drug Cartel known as Santa Blanca Cartel. The Santa Blanca Drug Cartel controls several regions of the country. The cartel is led by a man named El Sueno. El Sueno is the main target of our team. He is brutal in his methods and he influences people like a religious person. Due to El Sueno’s methods, the cartel gains more power and influence within and outside the country and turns Bolivia into the world’s largest producer of Cocaine. The Government of Bolivia task an elite special forces group named La Unidad to counter the Santa Blanca’s armed occupation within the country. After months of brutal fighting and bloodshed both the factions – the Unidad and Cartel Armed forces establish a truce to prevent further fighting and bloodshed. Due to the truce, some officials of La Unidad started working secretly with the Santa Blanca. The United States of America sends a D.E.A. Agent named Ricky “Ricardo” Sandoval as an undercover agent along with the C.I.A. to run a joint operation to gather intelligence on the cartel and to take out El Sueno. The United States was compelled to act on this Cartel when the cartel bombed the U.S. Embassy in La Paz and a D.E.A. Agent named Sandoval was executed by the Cartel after his cover was blown.

A Ghost Recon team is deployed in Bolivia as part of Operation Kingslayer, a joint operation between the C.I.A., D.E.A., and J.S.O.C. The team consists of team leader and support “ Nomad “, vehicle and assault specialist “Midas”, Hacker and tactical engineer “Holt”, and Sniper “Weaver”. The Ghost Team enter Bolivia with their C.I.A. friend, “ Karen Bowman”, who was a close friend of the D.E.A. Agent Sandoval (She is a very interesting character in this game, you will know why a few moments later.). They meet up with the leader of the Khatris 26 named Pac Khatri (Another interesting character of the game.). The Khatris were the only resistance against Santa Blanca Drug Cartel. Pac Khatri requests the Ghost Team to rescue Amaru from Santa Blanca. Amaru’s ideologies inspired the Khatris 26. The Ghost Team is then allowed to tackle the cartel in any way they prefer.

The Ghost Team breaks the cartel bit by bit. They targeted four main operations – attacking cocaine production facilities and stockpiles, disrupting smuggling operations, discrediting the cartel in the eyes of corrupt politicians and supporters, and inciting conflict between the cartel’s important people. El Sueno contacts Ghost Team and tells them to meet face to face. The Ghost Team finally agree to the meeting and goes to the location of the meeting but El Sueno was not there, it was an ambush. El Sueno again contacts the Ghost Team and tells them to join him and in return, he will pay them lots of money. The Ghost Team declines his request.

Proceeding further, the team finds audiotapes of Sandoval. He recorded the audiotapes for Bowman but they never reached her. The tapes stated that he was facing many problems in the mission. The reason for the problems was not only the crimes he committed to protect his cover, but also the reluctance of his superiors in taking action against the cartel. After retrieving Sandoval’s body from the cartel, they get a call from Sueno who gives them a confession audiotape of Sandoval in which he stated that he was responsible for the bombing in the embassy. He framed Santa Blanca Drug Cartel so that the United States Government will be forced to take action against the Cartel. Bowman and the Ghost Team were angry about the deception of Sandoval but they decided to move on with the mission as the cartel still poses a threat.

After dismantling half of the Cartel, Pac Katri tells the Ghost team that they have found El Sueno. But the Ghost Team gets suspicious when they find Amaru's dead body. They try to contact Bowman and find out that she was captured by the Khatris 26 and Pac Khatri broke their alliance. His ideology was to kill El Sueno himself and take the credit himself instead of giving the credit to the Americans. The Ghosts rescue Bowman and rush toward El Sueno’s Mausoleum to capture him before Pac Khatri kills him. After fighting through the rebel and cartel opposition, the Ghost Team surrounds El Sueno, who turns around revealing the body-less head of Pac Khatri in his hand. El Sueno surrenders and Bowman receives a call from her superiors that El Sueno made a deal with the Department of Justice to give them the names of the heads of the other drug cartels in exchange for immunity and witness protection.

The end of the story depends on us.

 If we go after El Sueno before dismantling the whole cartel ( which most of the players do) then the following happens:- El Sueno surrenders and starts exiting the mausoleum proudly after making the deal with the Department of Justice. He thought he had made a deal that will keep him alive. In the same moment, Bowman was frustrated by the decision of her superiors. She didn’t want to let him walk away alive. Therefore she pulls out a gun and blows off El Sueno’s Head. ( I like this ending so much.) This leads to her dismissal from the C.I.A. and he was arrested for murdering El Sueno. This world is so unjust. But Bowman was not regretting her actions as she knew the after the deal El Sueno would have become more powerful with the support of the United States.

If we dismantle the whole cartel by killing all remnants before going after El Sueno then the following happens:- Bowman takes El Sueno into protective custody. El Sueno provides intel on other drug cartels, terrorist groups, and arms smugglers. Bowman predicts that when the intel runs out, El Sueno will either be extradited by Mexico or cut loose and start a new drug cartel, starting the cycle over again. She and the Ghost Team resolve to prepare themselves for the next fight.

I personally liked and prefer the first ending because for me it was the right thing to do with a person like El Sueno. However, the game says that the second ending is the good ending. It's totally up to you to decide.

MY OPINION.

You can only destroy the cocaine. Sadly that's the only choice we have.

When Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands trailer was released I was so excited for the game due to its trailer. The trailer was really very awesome with the song ‘friction’ by Imagine Dragons. The trailer showed how we have different options available in the game to carry out the missions. The options include long-range, stealth, chaos, etc. But when I played the game it was not what I expected. I was not disappointed but I thought it would be different. I thought we would get to choose how we want to carry out a particular mission but it was not the case, we have to act according to the situation in the mission. There are no options.

A good thing about this game, you don’t have to search for vehicles all the time, instead, you can call your Khatris 26 friends and they would give you the vehicles you require whenever and where ever you want. Fast travel locations are also available so you do not have to drive or run too long. You get to roam freely but there are some places on the map in which you can get stuck and the only way to get out is to kill yourself with a grenade. If you don’t have a grenade then you will have to reload the checkpoint. Also, you can’t kill yourself easily as your teammate rush to save you quickly as soon as you are knocked out. But when you need them in a heavy conflict, then hardly come to rescue and let us die.

The drone is very friendly equipment in this game. It is the best equipment in the game and I use it all the time. Some places are equipped with jammers that don’t allow you to use the Drone but still, the Drone is a very helpful device in the game. More helpful than the A.I. Teammates.

In the Ghost Recon series, there is this one thing which I like the most. You can actually control your A.I. Teammates to some extent. You can tell them to move to a particular position. You can tell the teammate with a silenced gun to take out an enemy quietly and most importantly you can sync shot. Sync Shot means you can give your teammates individual targets and you can sync them with your shot. When you will shoot your target the other teammates will automatically take out their enemies. The targets need to be in the line of sight to carry a sync shot but it’s okay, it is realistic. You can tag enemies using the drone, binoculars, and your scope. This tool in the game is really cool. It allows you to kill 4 targets at the same time without getting detected.

The missions in the game are all almost similar but the good thing is you can carry out the mission in any way you want. You can capture your target without getting detected or you can kill everyone and then capture your target, it’s your choice.

There is a mission in Ghost Recon which reminded me of a ‘ Breaking Bad’ scene. Remember when Walter and Jesse dissolved the bodies in barrels of acid? There is a Cartel Boss in the game who does that too. When I went to capture him, I was so angry but then I found out he had the mental capacity of a child.

I hardly found any glitches in the game and the game did not stutter. The FPS was stable throughout the game and the game didn’t crash anytime. Therefore we can say that the game is built almost perfectly. The massive open world is almost flawless and there are a whole lot of things to do in the game before you can finish the game 100%. If you are looking for a game to keep you busy for a long period of time then this game is for you. This game is a perfect game to know the work of special operations team against drug cartels around the world.

GOODGAMER7 RATES THIS GAME => 9/10

GOODGAMER7 => HIGHLY RECOMMENDED