Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands

2025-02-08
Picture a man laid out on the ground, bald with a beard and Solid-Snake-ass eyepatch in full tactical gear, two rifles strapped on his back and a pistol on his hip, with a cigar hanging out of his mouth. Another man with a cowboy hat, sunglasses and a handlebar mustache in a wife beater--also with a cigar hanging out of his mouth--is reviving him. Their cigars almost touch, intimately. This is Ghost Recon Wildlands.

Imagine the cheesiest "Oorah"-American-Military-Larping-ass shit ever. Now imagine a character creator that lets you create every permutation of this, of course leading me and my friend to making the aforementioned clown men. And coming out of the mouths of these dopes is sharp cheddar grade dialogue like "It's not every day you get to meet an urban legend in the flesh." "You should tell that to my kid. Maybe he'd listen when I tell him to take the trash out." And their mission is to basically uhhh kill a bunch of Bolivians--sorry, liberate them from El Sueno, the comical drug kingpin antagonist. The best part is even though El Sueno is supposed to be the bad guy, the whole "USA secretly conducting affairs in a foreign nation with meatheads spouting dumb one-liners" thing makes it feel like you're the villain. And I'm not sure if that was the game's intended message. What I'm saying is Ghost Recon Wildlands is hilarious and I love it.

Thankfully your amusement will not be confined to its insane tone, no there is a whole big ass live service game that has seemingly over the years been sublimated down into just a really fun open-world co-op shooter. You and a buddy can spend your time kamikaze-ing drug dealers in planes and helicopters or steal an APC and unload millions of USD in ammo on Bolivian drug dealers just trying to make ends meet. Shooting is fairly tight and bullet drop really helps accentuate the long distances you'll be clipping unsuspecting empleados de cocaína with. The live service roots are evidenced by the bazillion guns and attachments and skills you'll be leveling up along the way but thankfully grinding isn't really a necessity. Me and my friend found we had the gear we ended the game with after 5 or 10 hours just poodling around on our extended South American murder-vacation.

Wildlands is not blemish free. Notably there are some dogshit levels where you need to tail someone or sneak through somewhere without being spotted or you'll restart the whole mission. Restarts often end up teleporting you to seemingly random locations like down a ravine. Thankfully the sandbox nature of the game can alleviate some of this pain. Case in point: the final mission of the game has you traveling several kilometers in a car down a road with heavily armed blockades all in a pretty tight time limit. After the first time we failed we said "Oh fuuuck this" and decided we'd instead fast travel to one of the generic side missions where you have to steal a plane. We steal the plane, ignore the part where we have to fly to such-and-such destination, and park it on the side of this mountain next to the main mission. Lo and behold our plane is still there after the cutscene so we fly it up and off the side of the mountain, skipping the entire route the game had clearly planned out for us, and just paradrop on the final destination and finish the final mission in record time. There is nothing I enjoy more in games than being given the tools to just say "Fuck you" and sidestep whatever thing the developers want me to do. Bravo Ubisoft.

After the first session of Wildlands I thought it was a one-and-done co-op session game but we kept coming back to it. It provides the perfect mixture of open-world map-clearing, solid gunplay, comical sandbox bullshit-ery, and bonkers Team America tone that me and my friend couldn't get enough. It is important to note that you can play it single-player but my guess is a lot of the joy of sharing in random moments like when you accidentally deploy your drone while in the helicopter and it blows it up and your friend cackles over the microphone. My recommendation is find a friend and visit Bolivia. I hear it's nice this time of year.