Ghost Recon Wildlands

Giving new meaning to the term ‘crack squad’

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Bolivia is absolutely lovely, brutal drugs rings aside. With up to three co-op buddies, we’ve flown choppers with flamingos, steered motorbikes across crisp salt flats, parachuted deep into lush jungles, and boated up creeks before taking drone selfies in a hideous misuse of resources. We’d probably write a decent guidebook if we didn’t have a drug cartel to destabilise. The Ghosts are here to drive the vicious Santa Blancas from Bolivia so the world can buy overpriced postcards there again.

El Sueño is the heavily tattooed man at the top. To get to him we must go through his lieutenants. To find them we need intel. and for that? It’s time to assault some bases, obviously, because this is a Ubisoft game. Lashings of enemy-stuffed compounds occupy Bolivia; some on mountain tops, some in remote villages, some in lumber yards and some in coca plantations staffed by farmhands we feel very bad about terrifying. Everything is expressed in the medium of outpost, as if Wildlands bumped its head and woke up with ‘outpost’ the only word it knows. The structure – collect intel, then do four or five missions, then kill the province boss – sounds like it’s comprised of different things, but actually it’s the same thing (clearing outposts).

Weirdly, this isn’t as bad as it sounds, despite all those thousands of bases you’ve stormed in the likes of Far Cry, Watch Dogs, and assassin’s Creed.

Ubisoft has honed its craft to such an extent that dismissing Wildlands on these grounds would be like chiding a watchmaker for making more watches, and there are subtly transformative touches here that could only come from a developer that by now knows exactly what it’s doing.

Outpost-modern