Review (PC, Gold)

I think perhaps I did Ghost Recon a disservice by playing it immediately after playing Viet Cong. See, I *really* liked Viet Cong. Both games are aiming for essentially the same target: punishingly realistic, squad-based, 20th century infantry combat. So I can start by saying essentially the same thing I said in my VC review: there will be those of you out there who fancy yourselves a fan of 'shooters' who will discover that they absolutely hate this kind of gameplay. What kind of gameplay is that? The kind that punishes you with instant death for even the smallest of tactical indiscretions. What I discovered, personally, is that as a fan of both shooters in general and realistic shooters, specifically, my enjoyment of one still isn't a sure thing. Which isn't to say that GR does it 'wrong'. That's why I think I inadvertently short shrifted it due to my recent experience with Viet Cong.

I was giddy during the first few levels of GR, doggedly determined during the next half dozen or so, aggravated over the last third of the game, and decidedly disgusted through the first four levels of the Desert Siege expansion. I didn't even touch the Island Thunder campaign (though I realized that I'd already played through quite a few of the IT levels in co-op previously). The problem isn't that GR is a bad game. Yes, there are some very specific issues with it that conspired to turn the experience negative, but I'm also inclined to give the game the benefit of the doubt and attribute my negativity in part to simply over-dosing. Note that the Viet Cong campaign was by no means short, and that I hadn't even mustered the energy to finish the expansion campaign, despite all the good will I have towards the game. Then immediately on the heels of that, instead of shifting into something altogether different, I dove into the GR campaign, which proved to be perhaps the right thing at the wrong time.

Having learned from the experience, though, I'm not going to do what I had otherwise planned, which was to play Rainbow Six 3 next, followed by America's Army, and then to finally play through the full Operation Flashpoint GOTY campaigns, concluding what was to have been a veritable tactical shooter orgy. Instead, it seems the thing to do is space them out. Moderation in all things, and particularly in things that can easily turn frustrating in the blink of an eye.

Good

• The command mode interface is simple but effective. With the right key-mappings, jumping to the command mode map and maneuvering the fire teams becomes second nature. It's nice to see a developer not afraid of pulling the gamer into a 2D interface when it's the most appropriate tool for the job.

• The friendly AI is capable of more than simply holding its own. While I still never let it handle mission critical circumstances, I didn't feel like I was Rambo, baby-sitting 2nd graders who might wander into traffic or cut themselves on sharp objects. For the most part, the missions played out consistently as decently complex affairs requiring teamwork. Note, however, that there were some exceptions to the AI's good behavior (see below).

• It was great fun being able to not only deal with a pool of soldiers over the campaign, but to have the ability to control the improvement of their characteristics over the course of the campaign as well. I'm talking about the skill points acquired by each soldier that participates in a mission, points that you can then assign to any of four combat skills. This, along with the seemingly superficial awarding of medals and combat honors, made for a much higher level of personal investment and cohesiveness in what was ultimately just a collection of otherwise unrelated maps. Having not initially read the manual, the skill points were a terrific surprise to me, one that I didn't even discover until like the 3rd mission. In fact, I actually somewhat resented the specialist soldiers. They had such higher skill ratings that it undermined the satisfaction of taking green soldiers and honing them into crack veterans over the course of the campaign. Here's my design tip for GR: instead of unlocking specialists when an optional mission objective is accomplished, award additional skill points (perhaps in a separate pool) that the player can assign as they wish, and/or unlock the additional weapon kits. This would have had nurtured a much stronger bond between the player and the soldiers than forcing the player to treat them as interchangeable, anonymous, parts.

Bad

• Above, I said the friendly AI was good. And it is. But it's not without fault. Occasionally, the polarity of their IQ would invert, and they'd do something really stupid. The most frequent offense was when I would switch to the second member of a fire team, after having carefully positioned the first member in a safe, covered position. The problem is that the 2nd member doesn't always keep close enough to the other, and when you switch to the 2nd member, the game's proximity code kicks in and decides that the first team member should 'catch up' with the 2nd member (who is now player-controlled). Except that is precisely the last thing I want him to do. I want him to stay exactly where the hell I just put him, so as to not get his ass shot while I bring up the other team member. [sigh] Another recurring problem is that the AI wouldn't always follow Rules of Engagement 101. At times, teammates left unsupervised would fail to take cover when taking fire, and would just stand out in the open until killed, which never took very long. Other times, even though set to fire at the enemy (there are 3 fires modes: recon, normal, and suppress), I would get an urgent message from them that they were pinned down, only to switch to one of the team members and find them staring at an exposed enemy but taking no offensive action whatsoever, as though they didn't see the enemy -- frustrating but not as consistently fatal as the other issues. Ultimately, these things aren't what turned me away from the game, but they weren't exactly endearing either.

• The game ultimately ends up feeling a tad sterile. A good deal of the blame for this lies, I believe, with the enemy AI. They never really *do* anything. Sure, they react nicely when the shooting starts, but prior to that, they seem more like staged actors, waiting for their cue. I guess that's essentially what they are, but it's to the game's detriment that they actually feel that way.

• Keeping with the 'feeling sterile' issue, the combat never really gets intense. There's never any real, shit-hitting-the-fan firefights. It's all very surgical. Maybe that's the way it is with special forces. But some of the missions are clearly staged to be bigger confrontations than your typical ninja strike mission, and its in these scenarios that the feel of the combat is most incongruous. This is due to two things. First, the enemy AI is wicked deadly and so you really can't afford to do the kinds of things I imagine a combat team would be doing in a real firefight: namely shooting a lot. If you don't have a direct bead on the enemy, you're better off just keeping the hell behind something than you are trying to fight. Eventually, you get an angle, and 3 or 4 bullets later, the threat is eliminated. The second reason is that you the player are wicked deadly. If you're not actively moving, you don't even need to be crouched or prone (though of course it helps) to pull off insanely accurate shots. Since you're so accurate, you end up taking advantage of the 4 pixels worth of leg or shoulder that the enemy has left exposed to dispatch him. From 500 yards. If the shooting on both sides was more sloppy, then I think that the fighting would be more organic and dynamic, and less surgically efficient. This isn't an argument for artificially exaggerated weapon inaccuracy (a la the machine gun spread in 1st and 2nd generation shooters). I personally much prefer the gunsight aiming in Viet Cong. I think it leads to higher immersion and more realistic combat.

Ugly

• Ugly = having your currently controlled soldier ecstatically yell, and I mean literally yell, into the comm that he/she had 'got another one', when you've just taken out a guard with a silenced weapon at close proximity so as to not invite the wrath of the entire enemy camp from which you're trying to stealthily extract POWs. This isn't the sole reason why I gave such a low immersion score, though it certainly could've been. Do Navy Seals yell like frat boys in their comm mic when they've just 'scratched a tango' on a stealth mission? No. No they don't.

• Tanks are supposed to protect infantry, not the other way around. Granted, it's a somewhat symbiotic relationship, but there's a reason why you always see grunts huddled in close behind a tank like a bunch of little ducklings behind their mother. Multiple times in GR, you're tasked with 'protecting friendly tanks', as though *you're* the one armed with an 100+mm gun and ensconced in multiple inches of metal/composite armor. Success in these scenarios comes from the following tactic: rushing to keep up near the front of the tank convoy, so as to get yourself killed in order to expose where the threats are going to come from, which you then eliminate after quick-loading. Sound like fun? How about this then: having your tank (remember, this is a *tank*!) inform you of 'enemy armor spotted', which is code for: if you don't get your demo guy up here within 30 seconds in order to launch a rocket at this enemy tank, I'm going to sit here and let myself get blown up by said enemy tank.' You're a tank, for fuck's sake! If you spot an enemy tank, fucking shoot at it! Or if you're going to insist on not firing your main gun under any circumstances, the least you can do is STOP MOVING FORWARD, so I have an opportunity to try to tactically engage the enemy tank with my rocket-armed demolitions guy, without having to just sacrifice him in order to preserve the stupid 'no friendly tank casualties' objective. If the game's going to force me to babysit a tank in order to complete a mission, then either make sure that it behaves like a tank, or let me control the take myself (like MOHAA).

• Time limits. *THIS* is what made me walk away from Ghost Recon. I don't remember there being any timed objectives in the original campaign, so if there were they obviously weren't as obnoxious as those in 2 of the first 4 levels of the Desert Siege campaign. After having failed repeatedly to accomplish an objective in an early Desert Siege level, I looked at a walkthrough to see what I'm doing so horribly wrong (having had efficient success through nearly the entire original campaign). Turns out that the objective has to be completed in under 9 minutes! 9 minutes!!! At that point, the game stopped being the game that I'd had fun playing and became an arcade game. To meet such a ridiculous time limit, you have to stop playing the game the way you'd learned to play it -- i.e. with a high degree of tactical caution, and it turned into Speed Ghost Recon. Ask anyone who really plays chess whether or not speed chess is real chess. The answer is no. Speed chess is speed chess. It's a different game. Ghost Recon with such a short time limit isn't Ghost Recon anymore, and therefore also isn't the game that I wanted to play. The easiest way to make me hate your game is to teach me how to be successful at it, and then change the rules.

Beautiful

• This game is a sniper's paradise. Seriously, if you like lining up that pixel-perfect headshot from the secluded anonymity of 1000yds away, Ghost Recon is your game.

   

Summary

So is Ghost Recon fun? As always, that depends on you. This is the kind of game that's easy to understand someone not liking. Depending on your gaming motivations, it can very easily sit squarely in the middle of Unfunsville. But it can also be precisely what some people want, and what they are very hard pressed to find anywhere else in gaming. And for that, I applaud Red Storm, for offering, and continuing to offer, what are ultimately niche games in an industry that attempts to root out niche-ness at every turn. Gaming is better when there are quality offerings all across the spectrum, with the recognition that 'quality' is quite separate from 'appeal'.

Despite walking away fairly disgruntled, I recognize that GR is nevertheless a very well done tactical squad-based shooter, not to mention the fact that it is one of the very few shooters to fully embrace my personal gaming Eden: co-op. So the verdict is that GR is a quality game. I also think that its intimidation level is low enough that it's a good choice for people who suspect they may like hardcore tactical shooters, but haven't actually played one. GR is a solid enough representative for the genre that you can safely extrapolate your experience with it.