Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands feels like the more realistic version of Mercenaries 2. Mercenaries 2 was an over the top open world action title where you overthrow a fictional Venezuelan government, and you got to pick whether you helped the Chinese or the Americans. You overthrew the government by taking out targets. You do the exact same thing in Wildlands except it is Bolivia, it is drugs not oil, and you can’t call down airstrikes to level entire cities. I am not sure that it is an upgrade.
Because of the more grounded world that Wildlands (also Wildlands is not a word) takes place in it just feels kind of off. You are supposed to be helping people, but you can jack their cars or accidentally kill them. Now if you disrupt the local populous too much they will stop helping you out, and killing civilians ends the game, so you go around driving the speed limit and carefully shooting when in cities. However, you do a lot of shooting, so there will be some collateral damage, and that hurts this game’s serious tone. It is hard to have a good time after I accidentally murdered some poor farmer, and then have to reload to a save.
All is not lost though. The world is varied and lush. The shooting is top notch, and something tells me if you have a group that you play games with, the co-op would be a ton of fun. So, I am not saying not to get Wildlands, I am just saying it feels different for an open world action game. Kind of like how Mafia is different from GTA, but again the Mafia games always have those moments where the tone of the game conflict with the structure of the game. Between For Honor and Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands, Ubisoft really has a lot riding on Q1 2017, and sadly for them, while both games seem fun, I am not sure either of them are for me. Though if you convince all my friends to get it, I might just have to join in on some open world co-op.