Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint Review
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint is the latest entry in the Ghost Recon subfranchise, and as such, it comes with a lot of expectations. At its core, it manages to meet many of these expectations, but it also drops the ball on more than one occasion. Ghost Recon Breakpoint puts the “tactical” in Tactical Shooter but fails to stand up in almost everything else.
The game shines in its combat, and that’s mostly because it’s incredibly similar to Ghost Recon Wildlands. Players will need to pick their targets, use stealth, and use their Breakpoint class abilities instead of blindly charging. In Wildlands, Breakpoint makes two major improvements that add to its tactical factor: damage and durability.
If players take enough damage or are hit in certain areas, they will be hurt, which will range from minor injuries to critical injuries. This restricts movement and eventually wears the player down, forcing them to frequently consider whether they should retreat and heal or press the fight. Stamina affects combat to a lesser degree, but if players aren’t watching their water consumption, they can quickly find themselves in trouble when exploring mountains or running from enemies, which build up quite a bit in Wildlands PvE battle at Breakpoint.
From there, Ghost Recon Breakpoint began to deviate from its basic formula, introducing different weapons and gear. Those who played Tom Clancy’s The Division will be familiar with this system, but it doesn’t really work here. Regardless of model, all snipers feel the same, all SMGs feel the same, and so on and so forth. Players just need to keep collecting improved weapons and gear to increase their gear level to progress throughout the game.
While players need to understand the tactical situation before heading into each battle, the enemy AI isn’t particularly challenging. Ghost Recon Breakpoint’s enemy tactics seem to prioritize brute force, so players who can find an easy place to manage it when caught will perform better than those who try to take them all at once. That said, players will still feel a high level of power when facing these enemies head-on, even in the worst-case scenario, which serves to weaken the combat and the story alike.
The story has two main parts: missions for Jace Skell and missions to do with Lt. Colonel Cole D. Walker, played by Punisher actor Jon Bernthal, and his team of alpha wolves. Walker brings the story to life in every scene he appears in, but otherwise the narrative is unremarkable. Major twists and revelations are either predictable or more than shock value, detracting from what should be a compelling story.
Ghost Recon Breakpoint also introduces RPG elements to its story, giving players several dialogue options. They feel dialed-in more often than not and give the story more depth than before. At its worst, it can be incredibly disruptive and completely destructive, which is the opposite of what dialogue options are supposed to do, and doesn’t seem to have any effect on many Breakpoint endings.
In design, the island of Auroa also seems to do the opposite of what it should. Ghost Recon Wildlands captures the beauty of wartorn Bolivia, but Auroa quickly becomes a different location. When flying across the island in a helicopter, nothing captures the attention, inspires, or captures the beauty of a fictional setting. This could also be due to the graphics, which don’t seem to meet current gen standards, and mud in a ton of Ghost Recon Breakpoint’s locations and surroundings.
Ghost Recon Breakpoint also features a PvP mode called Ghost War that feels as uninspired as the Auroa setting. The maps do nothing to notice, and the tactical approach to PvP ends up with a lot of downtime. Sure, there can be some tense moments and the development here gives a ton of reason to play it, but at the end of the day, it just feels like something tacked on for the sake of tacking, like of Breakpoint’s microtransactions have now been removed.
Overall, Ghost Recon Breakpoint is a good game but struggles to establish itself or stand out in an already small genre. It takes too much from The Division’s loot system, random game design choices, and RPG elements, muddying what Breakpoint is exactly about. It can look like a Looter Shooter at times but it fails to capture what makes Looter Shooters great. It can look like a big story focused RPG at times but drops the ball on delivering either a story or good, consistent RPG elements. It’s a Tactical Shooter at its heart, but that feels like something really unfamiliar to Breakpoint in the end.
Ghost Recon Breakpoint is out now for PC, PS4, and Xbox One. Today Technology was provided with a PS4 code for the purposes of this review.