Ghost Recon Wildlands Hands-on Preview – Everything I Wanted

Last week I got a chance to spend some time with Ghost Recon Wildlands. Having played most of the games in the series, I had been crossing my fingers and hoping that the follow up to 2012’s Ghost Recon Future Soldier (which I was quite fond of) would be a hit. After my time with the game, I think there is a good chance it will be.

The game started with customising my character. The features available here are much broader than The Division’s character options, with everything from skin colour to shoes being up for customisation. I entered the game with my character standing on the side of a mountain with my three squad mates, who were NPC’s at this point. We were overlooking a huge game world, with two cars next to us.

Checking the map, I realised that this game is big. The area I was overlooking was only a small portion of the map and within that area, there was was a lot of activities available. I think it’s safe to say, this game will have plenty to see and do.After selecting a mission, I jumped into a truck and my squad piled in too. There was a waypoint guiding me down the road on the side of the mountain, which I chose to ignore and drove directly to the marker which involved a steep decent full of rocks and trees. I flipped my car a few times and came to a stop right of the front of a compound that was full of enemies. Unfortunately, my stylistic driving had caused them all to notice us. Immediately they opened fire, civilians were caught in the crossfire and I learned a valuable less about how the game plays.

From what I experienced, there are many ways to approach each scenario, be it rolling in guns blazing, stealthily hanging back and thinning out the enemies, or a series of calculated take downs – you really do have a tonne of freedom here to play it your own way.Eventually I killed all the bad guys in the compound, found the objective (it was a device I had to scan which gave me the location of a weapons cache) and got into a shiny new car. From what I can tell, vehicles are going to play a big part in Wildlands, and thankfully there is a pretty big list of vehicles to choose from. Cars, bikes, boats, planes and helicopters are all available to use. The difference between flying in on a helicopter, shooting everything in sight, rushing in and completing the objective, versus driving in, stopping a distance away and sneaking in – that can be the difference between failure and success. Every mission will need to be assessed differently, which I think is very cool.

I spent a good amount of time in single player really enjoying myself. The open world, variety of missions, weapons, vehicles and enemies really had me engaged. I can see a lot of similarities to The Division, but with a more open world feel.

As a long time fan of the Ghost Recon series, I am very happy with what I saw. With very few issues, the game runs well and plays how I was hoping it would. If I had to summarise, I would say it sits somewhere between Future Soldier and The Division, taking the best features of both and mixing them together to make something that has a lot of potential to be a truly great game.

I will say is that it seems like this game will make for amazing co-op fun. I’m definitely looking forward to playing through the missions with friends and coordinating our plans of attack, learning who is best at what and seeing what happens – everything I wanted from a new Ghost Recon game.

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Press Start visited Ubisoft’s office to go hands-on with Ghost Recon: Wildlands. The game will release on PS4, Xbox One and PC on March 7th.