The Future's Bright, the Future's Ghost Recon

The Ghost Recon series seems to be going through a bit of an evolution, which you can see when you look at the history of this game. When this game first appeared a couple of years ago, the footage was more along the lines of Advanced Warfighter, which put could have made put it against competition from Battlefield and Call of Duty. You look at it now however, and it’s become something else entirely.
 

Your AI teammates will never give away your position, which is handy

There’s been hands-on with this game before; this second session was a lot more in-depth and comprehensive than the last one, so we have a better measure of what Future Soldier really is. In the early days, especially after the initial video concept was released, people were worried it was going to be yet another Modern Warfare or Battlefield. Not so- if you must liken it to anything, liken it to Gears of War, or any other iconic third-person shooter. Future Soldier is like a coin – two faces, two different and specific styles of play, and yet it’s all part of the same game.

We went hands on with bits of four separate missions in the single-player, each spread through-out different points of the game and together they did a good job of showing off the wide range activities you’ll be performing. There are two basic states to Ghost Recon: Recon, and Engaged. From what we can tell, you normally start off in Recon (unless the level dictates otherwise). If you get spotted at all by an enemy, that enemy then becomes alarmed and you enter the Engaged state. The fundamentals are basically the same, but certain stealth actions that you two whilst in Recon aren’t available (or aren’t practical) in the Engaged state. Whilst playing, you really do see the difference between the two, as Recon can be likened to games like Splinter Cell (without the wall climbing) and Engaged feels a bit like Gears of War (without the Locust and the chainguns).
 

Oddly enough, the locals don't seem to react much to a bunch of heavily armed men stalking around killing people

The Recon element of the game is looking like the better of the two. There’s just something immensely satisfying about sneaking from cover to cover, taking out enemies as you go. As the levels get harder, the enemy appear in larger groups, and if you want to remain undetected you have to make sure you cover all the angles and that everyone is accounted for. The control scheme is set up so that you can issue orders to your AI teammates, and ‘queue’ up shots for each of them, and then execute a simultaneous four-way kill.

The only criticisms we have so far is that there is a general lack of feedback on what’s going on around you. Granted, the other team members in your squad will actually point things out and talk about things, but trust me when we say it doesn’t end up being that helpful. Think along the lines of “over there” but then they don’t actually point to where they’re talking about. Other than that, we worry that the single-player portion of the game isn’t going to be that long. We have an official statement saying 10-12 hours, but during out playtest we managed to get through four (or parts of four, we don’t know) levels in the space of an hour/hour and a half. It’s possible we only saw snippets of the levels, and that they were made easy for our benefit, but it still seemed odd.



Still nothing concrete on the multiplayer side of the game, although we did manage to wrangle some extra details which will come of the interview we conducted – matches will consist of 16 players (8 v 8), there will be four game modes at launch, along with ten maps and three classes (which is a bit weird for a game where four-player co-op is the ‘thing’). The studio seem receptive to the idea of DLC, so we wouldn’t be surprised if any extra content had additions to the multiplayer component as well. Expect a multiplayer beta on the console soon as well.
 

Not sure what the actual divide is, but it seems to be around 50/50 between action and recon gameplay, depends if you can avoid getting caught...

At the time of writing, Future Soldier is feature complete, all that’s left now is to polish and iron out the finer details, and I’m sure the studio will use the extra time they’ve been given to good use. We’ll probably do another article once the multiplayer side of things is being shown, but so far we’re cautiously optimistic. There is enough uniqueness here that should interest gamers – whether you’re a fan of previous titles, or fans of the more stealth-orientated action games. Ghost Recon: Future Soldier is due out on Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 on May 22nd in the US, and May 24th in Europe. The release of the PC version is still TBC.

Most Anticipated Feature: We’re interested in seeing how the multiplayer turns out, but going on what we know right now, commanding your squad to do simultaneous attacks is rather satisfying.