Its predictable missions, boorish morals and awful jokes might suggest otherwise, but Ghost Recon Wildlands is not a thoughtless game. On the contrary, Ubisoft seem to have spent months researching the country of Bolivia, the jargon of the narcotics trade and how cocaine is cultivated. Talented environment artists and fluent systems designers have made the game look and play acceptably and there are occasional streaks of imagination – the Sync Shot, whereby you mark a series of enemies then hit fire to have your team silently execute them all at once, finally makes one of the eeriest spectacles from Call of Duty into something interactive.
Ghost Recon is not thoughtless, but it is a waste of time. The aforementioned research is visible only barely; for the sake of a simpler, less challenging story, the rest seems to have been thrown out. Likewise, the competent parts of the game are devoured by the majority. The people who worked on Wildlands clearly have ability, but given how the game's myriad – and wholly avoidable – demerits overwhelm its better qualities, they have been misused. Wildlands isn't stupid, cheap or striving to become better. It just doesn't care if it's wrong. Regardless of what it does or asks us to do, this game is impervious to good taste.
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Considering the popular understanding of drug cartels – largely accrued through films and television, but still – it's surprising how bullish and inconsiderate Wildlands feels. Perhaps if the dialogue weren't so inane (when you get into a gunfight your character will exclaim “Sh*tballs!”; when you spy on a local power player having sex, a team-mate chortles that he wants to go down there and join in) it'd be easier to respect the game's broad moral strokes. But despite the Bolivian landscape, which seems based on robust research, Wildlands' story feels like the work of a team that doesn't know – and never cared to know – its subject matter. When you repeatedly hear words like ‘sicario’ and ‘narcos’ being dropped throughout, you can't help but suspect Wildlands is only interested in the drug trade because, thanks to the movie Sicario and the TV show Narcos, it is currently in vogue. Real life cartels do provoke an uncompromising military response, and perhaps are despicable. But Ghost Recon doesn't sell that to us. It's a craven appeal to popularity, which tries to disguise its disinterest in honesty, truth or or sincerity behind bad jokes.
Once again, it just feels like an unfortunate waste. Wildlands, evidently, has been created by some talented people. Play it with a friend, or friends, in cooperative mode and you can talk over the dialogue and ignore the story – then, the game starts to feel like something anyone could enjoy. Ultimately, however, Wildlands is a dispassionate, self-defeating experience. If sandbox games, particularly from Ubisoft, have proceeded in kind for the past eight or so years – arguably following the success of Assassin's Creed II – Ghost Recon feels like the end of an era, or at least what ought to be the end of an era.
This particular take on the open-world genre, defined by quantity over quality, plainness over intrigue, has been exhausted. And Ubisoft are capable of better: Watch Dogs 2 played not unlike Wildlands, but had heart, conscience and a thorough understanding of the world it depicted, and so remains one of the most surprising games of last year. With that in mind, and when you simply stand and look around Ghost Recon Wildlands, it's hard to understand how so much talent, time and money can result in something so arid. One can only hope that Ubisoft – or maybe triple-A development in general – understands next time to better allocate their considerable resources.
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