Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint

 


Breakpoint is yet another Ubisoft open world exploration looter shooter, something they've been pumping out with high frequency like Division 1, 2, Far cry series etc. At least these Ghost Recon games are co-op like the previous Wildlands. Breakpoint was released just a few months after Division 2 (which I liked) and you can just tell its almost the same damn game only bigger in scope and with vehicles...but what lurks beyond the premise of the game is so much more baffling.

Everything about Breakpoint is generic, frankly. Because the franchise has seemed to lost its identity. The Ghost Recon franchise identity was for a time in the early 2000s a counterpart to the Rainbow Six games. Rainbow Six being these indoors, close quarters games, but then Ghost Recon came about as this bigger, outdoors level squad tactics games. But due to Ubisoft basically making every game an open world, outdoors type squad game, theres not much point for the Ghost Recon IP anymore. These Ghost Recon games seem to want to put more emphasis on tactical and strategic gameplay, but is that the case in Breakpoint?

The first impression, and long lasting impression, is that the UI and all of the interface structure is total confusing, bloated dog shit. You get into the game and its spamming you with dozens of popups, random bullshit to learn, its all so disjointed and a mess. For example, from the get go, buying the basic package on steam, that grants you 'Episode 1'. But on the world map, you apparently at  the beginning of the game have access to random Episode 2 and 3 missions? But also you dont even have full access to Episode 2 and 3, just teaser missions or something? Its so god damn confusing I couldnt even figure out what was going on until well into the game. Luckily I avoided accidentally playing anything outside of Episode 1, which is the real main campaign. Like, what were they thinking with this mess? To make matters worse, you don't just have this basic quest journal or mission screen, you have to go to some confusing Objectives Board where it displays a dozen characters and you have to seemingly at random just pick a character and do missions for them, until all of the character missions are done then you can do the final boss guy mission? I still dont really get it. Even from the very start of the game, before youre even playing, it throws all these weird menus and options at you, like asking about Loot mode or realism mode, making you toggle all these options about leveling and hiding hud elements or some shit, before youve even played the game. I just left it at the default settings, but it all comes across as a mess.

To make things even worse, merely just selecting a mission to do is a struggle. Theres this 'pinning' system where you can have multiple missions/side quests/ activities pinned at the same time. So if you try to just select one mission, chances are youve accidentally already have multiple missions pinned at the same time, which just makes things really confusing. The controls to unpin missions and basic interface navigation in general is just awful. You have to mouse over the pin place, use the WASD keys to scroll, then click to unpin and make sure you only have one mission pinned at a time. All things that took many hours to figure out and caused much confusion.

Basically I cant remember the last time I've been so confused and had so much trouble with basic menu navigation in a game, its awful. Once you finally understand how to tackle missions and select them, whats the actual gameplay loop like?

Well that too is severely underwhelming. The missions dont exactly tell you what to do, its more vauge. It took many hours to decode exactly what its telling you to do. It will say things like "Go to this base and discover the way in" But what that really means, is shoot someone that has an (I)nformation icon above their head in the leg, and interrogate them to complete the objective. Or it will say things like "Find the photograph" and it will involve walking up to a random civilian and asking him a question. Or it will involve walking around some base and picking up random documents. It will rarely tell you exactly what to do / go without first having to interrogate some guy, pick up some note, or shoot enemy in leg then interrogate. The other objective is to just kill everyone or one specific guy and leave. Those 4 objectives are basically the entire game.

So the gameplay loop consists of "Go to this base complex, pickup notes, talk to civillian, interrogate someone, or kill this person then leave".  Unfortunately, for the first half of the game or more atleast, every single base had like 12 enemies maximum. Its an open world game, so you spend a lot of time travelling to the mission location, then you get there, spend 90 seconds killing a dozen guys, then you have to fly back. Thats the first half of the game. There's barely any fucking combat! Sometimes you dont even kill anyone, you just walk in and grab a note and leave. For some stupid fucking reason none of the people in the game have cellphones, so whenever you complete an objective you have to travel across the map and talk to them face to face. I mean what the fuck, most of the game just consists of travelling across the map and talking to people, and watching cutscenes. Not good.  

Yes there are fast travel points, but it took hours to figure out how these damn things worked either. Every mechanic in this game is just so obfuscated, janky, and disjointed like what were they smoking when they developed this shit? To fast travel, you have to find some camp icon on the map called 'Bivouacs' then you go there. You can unlock these seemingly by talking to random civilians then they tell you where it is which marks it on the map. Once you arrive there, theres always these long animations of your guy making camp or something. When you arrive there, theres no vehicle. But if you sit at the camp, you can actually magically spawn a vehicle. I find it funny that in the previous game, Wildlands, I had to grind for half the game to unlock the helicoptor, naturally the best choice for fast travel, but in Breakpoint you have the helicoptor unlocked by the start so you can actually spawn helicoptors at these fast travel points. What that means is the entire gameplay loop is finding the next main objective on the map, traveling to the closest fast travel, then spawning a helicoptor and flying to the objective. That alone is like 75% of the game. The driving isn't anything to write about, very generic arcade style easy car driving, but why would you drive a car or vehicle in this game? Its just objectively worse and slower in every way to the helicoptor that you can easily spawn, thats kind of the problem with these games. It has all these vehicles you can spawn in, but why the fuck would I care when I can just spawn a helicoptor and get there way faster and easier? It's like a flaw in the game design of open world games like this. Thats why The Division is just way better than these Ghost Recon games, it forfits the vehicle bullshit and makes actually playing eventful missons its focus.

A lot of the game is watching cutscenes or listening to people talk to eachother. The story and performances are often times laughable in a bad way. The facial animation on display here is a joke and looks completely bonkers and jank. Whoever did the facial animation was phoning their job in. The story is yet another generic military dudebro buzzwordy incomprehensible mess but this time, they've hired the actor that plays Shane from the Walking Dead. That's probably where half of the budget of this game went. Theres a ton of cutscenes and dialogue but maybe only 10% of it is interesting. Some of the flash back military sequences were sort of interesting where you see the sort of shit they were doing during the war, the scenes with the Walking Dead actor I guess were slightly entertaining, but overall nothing stands out except a cliche and corny military dudebro drama. Atleast you get to fully customize your character at any time with all sorts of options and gear that you get to see in cutscenes but its hard to care about it that much.

Speaking of the gear, yeah the game was released shortly after The Division 2 and it uses almost the exact same gear system. When you kill enemies, sometimes they will drop a glowing item on the ground. Different colors signifies different rarities,  Yellow being the best/unique, purple being very good, blue being good, green etc etc. You can also get loot from these crates around the map. I played the whole game in co-op, which is the main reason I bought it, but I found it kinda strange that the loot crates seem to have the same items for me and my co op partner, not sure how that worked. But yeah the loot is really braindead its literally just when you pickup an item, in the top right you will see either a green up arrow or a red down arrow. Then, all you do is hold Tab to equip it if its Green up. The whole game I just equipped anything with green up arrow. Its even more braindead than Divison loot, and way less interesting. I guess it was slightly exciting finding new guns and things to play with, but the loot is by no means complex or requires brainpower. Theres even a button to 'optimize gear' and automatically equip the best stuff.

The game has all sorts of classes which seem to grant just 1 special ability each, stuff like Assaults ability makes you do more damage for 10 seconds when pressed, the sniper class I guess makes you more accurate for 10 seconds when pressed, theres a Recon class that lets you spot enemies easier or something.But ultimately the classes didnt seem that different or meaningful. They all share the same skill tree anyway. To emphasize just how bad the interface is, is the fact that the game has multiple level categories for your character. So it seems like you have an overall level, then you have a Class level, then you also have an XP level. What the fuck? why 3 different level categories? So damn confusing. Even worse is the fact that the Class level was almost impossible to figure out. At the beginning of the game I notied that for a few hours my class Ranking was stuck at level 3, and would never go up. Well after a few hours I started thinking, ok, how the hell do I raise my class rank? So I had to google it. Turns out theres a tiny place on the loadout screen where if you hover over it, it will say your class rank and you have to do these little challenges to advance the class rank. Stuff like kill 10 enemies with assault rifle, or kill 5 enemies in under 10 seconds. Well you have to complete these specific challenges to actually advance your class rank, something which is easily missed for many hours of gameplay. Since the game has this 'pin' system, you can actually pin the required challenges under your mission objectives to stick onscreen at all times, which I guess is the one good thing about the system. So after I figured that out, the combat got a little bit more interesting because atleast now the game keeps giving me these little mini-challenges I have to do in order to advance my class rank. But it didnt seem like advancing the class rank really did anything significant, just gave a few cosmetics or some slight permanent buffs like 10% more stamina or accuracy or something. But the challenges were atleast kind of fun. The skill tree is really nothing special either, its broken up into a few types, you have "Perks" which is like Call of Duty type perks you equip up to 3 of, stuff like regen stamina faster, automatically mark enemies on minimap (best one),  take less damage, etc. You have passive abilities, stuff which is just always granted which are more minor, stuff like 25% more ammo, or climb hills better. Then you have 'abilities' which grant you new abilities like being able to buy better things at the shop (Something we never fucking used cause it seemed pointless and the game throws so much loot at you why would you have to) - stuff like being able to more fully upgrade your weapons, a system which I partook in but seemed completely pointless because by the time you got the materials to upgrade your weapon to tier 3, you already picked up another better weapon so whats the fuck point? Yeah its not much to write home about, its just filler. I do like that there is a huge variety of weapons you can find and play with, thats a big bonus, some of them seem to do more damage based on the ammo type, something I only noticed towards the end of the game because once again the game does such a bad job presenting its self to you in a coherent manner.

The characters in the story are mostly unlikable or generic modern slop. That's really all I'm gonna say about them. I will not remember a single one in a weeks time. Nuff said. Main character you play as is just another run of the mill gruff military dude.

 
So what is the game all about really? Well its a stock generic military open world Ubisoft shooter, pretty much no different than the likes of Far Cry just in third person, its almost the same as The Division just it has vehicles and worse missions, worse objectives, and way too much story/cutscenes/diagloue not enough gunplay. The actual gunplay is just average or medicore, it feels like every other Ubisoft game. The guns have significant recoil, I guess to try to retain some amount of tactical feeling to the game, but its still a pretty braindead easy, spot enemies through walls, mark every enemy with a triangle, take out the red dots on the minimap, modern shooter game. It basically has no identity or does anything of note. Its also janky as fuck and unpolished around the edges, its got bugs, me and my friend would constantly even wonder if we're doing the same mission because our objectives would constantly get jumbled up and messed up from the shitty pin system, causing frustration and confusion. Whenever I would fast travel, my friend wouldnt automatically come with me so I'd have to press a button to request him to join and the whole process just gets really tedious, really fast. Also, when doing missions for some stupid reason it keeps popping up to go to the 'Consulting' screen where you literally just have to look at a wall of text and then close it before the mission will proceed, like I said its chaulk full of half assed half baked mechanics that barely make sense that only operate as a way to waste your time or make you fumble with clunky shit menus. Fuck. yeah its like half the time youre playing this game it will be spent watching cliche corny cutscenes or fumbling with a bunch of shitty menu screens. The more I think about it, the more the game is pissing me off in retrospect. Like I said, the first half of the game is barely any fucking combat, you spend 15 minutes watching/listening to dialogue, flying across the map, you kill 5 guys then you have to fly back and repeat repeat repeat. Its awful.

Atleast in the third to last quarter of the game you start to have to infiltrate huge enemy bases where you actually spend more than 5 minutes fighting enemies, this part of the game was okay, it was atleast more entertaining to have actual combat but it still wasnt very challenging. The game is pretty much really easy for 90% of the campaign, something which is odd with this supposedly tactical strategic gameplay focused shooter. You might be able to say its my fault for not picking the "hard mode" or whatever, but not really, the way the game is laid out and presented to you its such a fuckin mess to figure out so I just went with the default settings, its not my fault they made the default settings so piss easy. Anyway towards the end of the game you get these batches of missions where you can fail if you accidentally kill the wrong guy or fail to interrogate one of the enemies, something that kept happening to us because its not made obvious at all. So then when you fail you have to dig through menu after menu just to restart the mission, that was bad. Some missions towards the end have a bunch of overpowered robot vehicle things which were kind of bullshit but honestly I was relieved to have some aspect of challenge in the game. Like your character takes a lot of bullets to die, it has auto-regen health, you have healthkits ontop of it, its pretty hard to actually fail a gunfight unless youre total shit at shooter games. Other than that every mission is still the same, fly to this base, kill everyone/pickup document/interrogate/fly back watch cutscene. The end mission you can apparently choose one of two endings, we chose the ending to kill the Walking Dead actor guy, it had this giant vehicle outside that took like 10 mins of shooting at it straight to kill, then we just went in and killed the end boss and that was kinda it. No end credits or anything, just plopped back into the main world to free roam and do all the optional shit / pvp shit I guess? Or buy the $60 pass for 'episode 2 & 3'dlc - Yeah, no thanks.

If you want another generic open world military co-op shooter game, I guess this is an option. The graphics are actually more underwhelming than I thought they would be. While at times it has great draw distances and colorful environments, it actually doesn't look THAT good with some bad textures and rough around the edges animations and presentation. But if you just want to play some corny military drama story game with shooting with a buddy for a weekend or two, its not the worst thing in the world, took us about 15 hours to finish.

5/10