Say what you will about Ubisoft but you can’t deny it’s a publisher committed to core franchises and to giving us reasons to return to them. Whether it’s full-on remakes like Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced or free updates to the Far Cry series, there’s always something in the back catalogue to dip into when you fancy a bit of the Ubisoft Formula.
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands is the latest to join the latter camp, getting a new current gen upgrade that gives it the fidelity you’d expect of a modern game and bundles it with some neat new content, all for the princely sum of absolutely nothing.
Released back in 2017, Wildlands was a fun, if slightly divisive, squad based shooter that put an emphasis on player choice, letting you tackle how and when to dismantle the fictional cartel ruling Bolivia. As always with Ubisoft games of this era, there’s a fairly thin plot to do with a criminal organisation overseen by a particularly nasty leader, but if I’m being brutally honest, I didn’t care about it in 2017 and I don’t care about it now. This is a “skip the cutscenes to get to the shooting faster” kind of game and that’s fine.
Bolivia is a huge map and it’s packed with things to do. It’s a free-form experience so you can tackle objectives in any order, guided by a rough threat level for each region to let you know how aggressive you can expect things to be. You’ll find intel points on the map which can lean to main missions, with all the critical content helpfully marked in yellow, so you know if you’re actually progressing the game or just completing busywork, of which there’s plenty. It’s the standard affair of finding stuff to collect, blowing up convoys etc, and while it’s a bit of a drag, any experience in the game is improved while playing with friends so Bolivia can be a great sandbox to play around in.
The main gripe with exploring the world is the vehicles themselves, which are sadly God awful to control. Boats and air vehicles aren’t so bad but anything with wheels has you skating across the terrain like it’s made of ice. It feels like they’ve animated weight that the vehicles simply don’t have, and it creates a jarring disconnect while you play. Respawns are also frustrating, as you could spend three minutes driving a clumsy car across the map to your objective, get killed and instead of respawning outside of the compound you’re attacking, you and your squad end up back at the same spot you spawned in at. It leads to frustrating moments that shouldn’t be there if better checkpointing was in place, and feels like the sort of quality of life improvement that could have been implemented.
Gunplay has held up well, and popping off headshot after headshot with a silenced sniper rifle is incredibly satisfying. I love it when games take you into first person when you aim down sites, and it works well in Wildlands where you’re constantly repositioning and stalking your way across compounds. The selection of tools in your arsenal is decent, and along with your guns you’ve got access to gadgets like mines and lures, a drone for scoping ahead and more. There is also the signature sync shot, which lets you mark up to 3 enemies and when your ghosts are in position you can either give them the nod or shoot at a fourth target and they’ll take down theirs simultaneously. It’s as rewarding as ever and it’s satisfying seeing four guards drop simultaneously.
Unfortunately the ghosts themselves are about as smart as a bag of rocks, which isn’t ideal in a tactical shooter. On several occasions they got caught while in stealth going through a compound as they couldn’t be bothered to crouch while coming over to my position, and then when we were being hunted they didn’t bother shooting the enemies firing at me despite my orders. They’re also infuriatingly slow getting into vehicles, even when under fire. It made me wish I could bark orders to them, SOCOM style, through my headset and tell them to hurry the fuck up. Yes, you can ignore them and later they’ll magically spawn onto the side of your chopper, but that’s not the point.
You’re probably reading this review to find out if the upgrades actually change much and from my memory of the game nine years ago I’m pretty confident they do. We’ve got shiny, sharper visuals and a steady 60fps, which helps make the whole experience feel a lot more slick than I remember it being. I didn’t notice any visual quirks that have arisen with some other Ubisoft games getting the 60fps treatment, and overall for a free upgrade it’s impressive.
There’s also the Last Rites campaign that’s been added which takes you to a new, more condensed section of Bolivia and sprinkles in a light dusting of the occult as you work to dismantle a creepy cult. I quite liked the smaller scale as it means less trekking across a huge map, giving you a slightly more curated experience. While it didn’t feel massively different, I appreciated how approachable it felt compared to the choice paralysis the main map can give you. The return of the much loved Predator mission, as well, is a feather in this update’s cap.
Despite a handful of mid-sized issues, it’s hard to balk too much. The game can be found very cheap, and with the free upgrade it’s an easy one for you and your pals to pick up and chip away at together. Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands might not be one of the best Ubisoft outings but it’s a solid and accessible shooter that works both as a solo experience or in co-op.
