More than a year after Ghost Wildlands came out, I dove into it. Mainly as I had a person that I played Rainbow 6 Seige wanted me to give it a try. It took me the better part of a month to get through the entire campaign. I never claim to be in a race to do it so that amounted to about 74 hours worth.
Ghost Wildlands
I found that GW has the largest map that I had ever played on not counting MMO’s. There is SOO much to do in there that I did not think that I would finish. All of them are related to the Santa Blanca Cartel which is what the entire game is based on. You are part of an elite team to take them down. AT ANY COST. More on that later.
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The game is set in the South American country of Bolivia. Or at least Ubisoft’s version of it. It is gorgeous with jungles, deserts, swamps, and caves. All of these areas are used extensively in the game and really are important in how you play the game. If you are in the desert, you better have an escape plan with a vehicle or you are done. This brings up the question about vehicles. Yes, there are cars, trucks, choppers, planes…and you have to use all of them. Most of them, kind of hard to get used to, but you will
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I had the most difficulty getting used to the choppers. I would guess it is just the combination of the throttle with the attitude control. And speaking of vehicles, it drove me crazy when you target jumped in a vehicle to run away when you were in your mission. They take off too damn fast.
This brings up the problem that I see this game has. It has 20 locations, multiple settings, lots of targets, and tons of ways to get there. Yet, mission variety was missing and the missions that you had followed the same path from the prior county or province. Each one had a boss, you had to destroy something, then steal something, then interrogate, then go through some sort of obstacle.
Doomed?
Don’t get me wrong. I had a lot of fun in the first week I played it. When I had to learn each vehicle, and how the parachutes works, and how to sneak around made the game super fun. Is the repetitiveness going to break the game though? It might. I had to keep in mind though that there are small things that some people may do just that one bit differently. The missions can be affected by small choices.
The boss characters are interesting as well. The moments you see them and deal with them are usually very satisfying. We are not talking about Mario level great video game boss’s, but they are still entertaining and. . . gross.
The last bit of this review is to say that this game is not for children. I don’t say this because of the shooting. It is because of things like the boss that dissolves bodies with chemicals. These are people that fight the cartels and they needed to be eliminated. Or about a different boss playing sex games while torturing their captives. This is way too adult to me.
Multi-Player
This can be more coop fun if you have a decent group. They will most likely not be as good as the AI though. Each person has to do their part, but even bringing in different vehicles for each person is totally unique and can help in the missions.
In the end, I really liked the game. I cringed at the violence and cruel storylines and even got over the duplication of missions. It sucked me in with the different bosses and just going through the map was a lot of fun.
I would give this a 7.5/10 and highly recommend you give it a try at least.
Rick