The open beta for Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands is running this weekend, giving players the opportunity to roam around parts of Bolivia and cause havoc with friends. For those who don’t know, Ghost Recon Wildlands tasks a team of four contract soldiers with shutting down various cartels throughout Bolivia. It’s basically a plot along the lines of Sicario with more action-oriented gunplay.
Much like The Division, Ghost Recon relies on teamwork and online partners as you fight through the hordes of drug smugglers and bandits. However, there are some major differences. The Division is a very slow-paced, serious game where most of the enemies are bullet sponges. Seriously, some of these enemies can take hundreds of bullets without flinching. The enemies in Ghost Recon Wildlands, on the other hand, can go down with one well placed shot. You can sneak up to a bandit encampment, hide in the tall grass, and pick off enemies with silenced shots. Even the handgun is powerful enough to dispatch most baddies.
The other major difference between The Division and Ghost Recon Wildlands is that your squad always has four members, whether you are in single player or roaming with friends. The Division left you alone unless other players were around. The decision truly made New York City feel more lonesome, but it also made finishing missions very frustrating.
Surprisingly, the AI team members in Wildlands actually work quite well and keep the frustration level down. They stay stealthy when necessary or go in guns blazing if you give the command. You can even tap the D Pad while driving to have your team members lean out the windows and lay waste to whatever is around. This does bring up the point that the command wheel is a very handy tool. Simply holding down R1 brings up different options such as “Go Here”, “Attack”, or “Stay”. These commands make every mission so much easier as you have the ability to move each soldier to specific points and synchronize your attacks. I even finished one mission by sitting in an overwatch position with my sniper rifle and moving my team through a base with my binoculars and the commands. Work smarter, not harder.
Of course, fiddling with the commands and completing the included missions did lead to an education of sorts. I found that while Ubisoft may be billing Wildlands as a more serious action game with officially licensed 5.11 Tactical Gear, it’s vastly more entertaining if you lean into the goofiness factor and look for ridiculous options at every turn. Instead of taking a military vehicle to chase a convoy, why not instead use a pseudo-Cadillac? At least your team could travel with the air conditioning on. Or, why not recreate 80’s TV shows while assaulting a base? Bolivia is your oyster, and it should be enjoyable. Below are five examples of some entertaining things I saw this weekend, starting with a unique driving style:
Surveying the beautiful landscape.
Barreled Across the Mountains In Jalopniks
The beta drops you in a small, closed off section of Bolivia known as Itacua. Although smaller in size, this area still boasts picturesque mountain ranges and interesting rainforests. The environments are gorgeous to stare at and very enjoyable to explore due in large part to the ridiculous driving physics and sheer array of vehicles. Ghost Recon Wildlands has a fun assortment of vans, jeeps, SUV’s, dirt bikes, and cars with which to follow the roads and complete missions. Ubisoft probably prefers that these vehicles stay on the dirt paths and paved highways, but where is the fun in that?
This is how you drive.
Half of the fun from Wildlands comes from seeing an objective marker in the distance and traveling to it as the crow flies. The worse the vehicle, the better the ride. As it turns out, the cars and trucks in Wildlands can take a ton of abuse. I would literally jump, bounce, and roll my cars through rivers and over boulders for minutes on end before smoke started pouring from under the hood. Even that didn’t keep the car from running. I just kept going.
This won’t stop me.
The best part of driving this psychotic way is that it doesn’t shake your team in the slightest. Not one member mentioned anything about slowing down or staying on the road. They just sat quietly in the back seats. The only time that they reacted even slightly was when a large town car landed upside down in a river. Even then, they just quietly exited the vehicle and waited for me to turn it over so we could continue on our way.
This…unique commuting style saved a lot of time as I journeyed from mission to mission, and it also unlocked new routes into bases. Most snipers don’t notice a lone van stealthily driving down a river outside the gate. Or maybe they just think the driver is crazy. Either way, I still found it easier to infiltrate enemy bases with a water landing than to go through the main entrance.
Stealth Van is on the case.
Broke a Piece of Construction Equipment Reenacting the A-Team
Of course, cars and trucks aren’t the only random vehicles with which to cause havoc. Wildlands also has a few pieces of construction equipment littered around the towns and encampments. I haven’t technically found a drivable forklift yet, but there are a few diggers. One of these diggers happened to be sitting in the midst of a firefight. Having seen too many episodes of The A-Team, I was well aware that the digger’s scoop was perfect for stopping bullets and moving cars out of the way. With this in mind, I punched the gas and tore across the street. Technically, I did move all of the cars out of the way and made a few bandits run for cover, but there was an unforeseen consequence.
The digger, as it turns out, doesn’t fit well in tight spaces. I found this out as my vehicular rampage took the digger across the street and up a flight of stairs, where it landed between a rock wall and a large house. Try as I might to maneuver the digger out of this predicament, it was completely stuck in place. My attempt to recreate one of the most entertaining TV shows of all time had failed miserably, and I had been shot in the process. Luckily, Wildlands has a revive system, so my team brought me back to life just in time for me to take out the enemies with a high-powered rifle.
Oops.
Stole a Drug Lord’s Lamborghini
The Ghost Recon Wildlands Beta offers six main story missions and countless side objectives that give you a solid look at Bolivia. One such mission tasks you with sneaking into a Cartel base to steal a “supercar”. Basically, it’s a Lamborghini Aventador SV, but Ubisoft doesn’t have licensed vehicles in the game. Instead of the standard SV logo, the in-game version says VS on the rear quarter panel. But let’s get back to the actual story, because most people probably couldn’t care less about the depictions of cars.
So there I was, sneaking into this base. Strangely, there weren’t more than two or three guards roaming the premises. Instead of taking them out and possibly causing a scene, I instead chose to sneak around to the garage and hotwire the car. This kickstarted a scene where one teammate and I raced around the encampment looking for the exit while the car alarm sounded. The guards tried to respond and shoot the tires, but I left them in a cloud of dust and went barreling out onto the mountain roads.
Unfortunately, the car was much faster than expected, and I flew across the road and into a river. The windshield shattered and the hood bent backward at an odd angle. Basically, the car would have been totaled by any insurance company. But this wasn’t a normal situation.
Instead of restarting the mission, I simply punched the accelerator and climbed the steepest hill around and landed back on the road. Sure, the car technically landed on a van, but it was still on the road. The next two minutes were an exhilarating race up the roads as I attempted to make it back to the rebel camp in one piece.
That is one destroyed Lambo.
I eventually arrived at the destination, car broken and barely running. The funny thing is that the rebel soldiers didn’t care at all that the car was destroyed. One even jumped on the roof to show his excitement. Although he may not have intended that. Either way, the mission was still really entertaining and showed that car chases are much more entertaining with speed and power.
Assaulted a Sicario House Via Parachute
As you complete missions in Wildlands, you earn XP and unlock new skills. Some boost your health while others give the drone a better battery life. The best unlockable is a simply parachute. This may not seem like much to those who have played any Just Cause or Far Cry 3, but the parachute adds more options to the game. For example, I needed to take over a Sicario House up in the mountains. Every time I flew by in the helicopter, the guards would sound the alarm and start shooting. I just wanted to take them out in a stealthy fashion, but the helicopter was simply too loud. So I switched to a different mission until I leveled up again.
Once I purchased the parachute, I went back to attempt the takeover, only this time was at night. Instead of buzzing the house like normal, I flew high into the air, turned on my night vision goggles, and bailed out of the helicopter. As I floated down toward the house, I noticed that not a single guard had heard my approach. They were all lazily wandering around the yard and looking for ground-based attacks. This was the perfect situation.
Night jumps make for epic missions.
Instead of causing a ruckus, I landed silently in the back yard and pulled out my silenced handgun. From this point on, taking over the house was a simple matter as I silently dispatched each guard before they could call for help. I was in-and-out with my bonus intel in maybe three minutes. Basically, it was a picture-perfect operation. Although my helicopter did land on someone’s pigs and turned them into raw bacon. Oops.
Hijacked a Convoy With Jeep-Based Assault Commands
I mentioned earlier that the squad commands are basically the best part of Ghost Recon Wildlands, but I didn’t quite explain my point. So, let’s do just that with this example:
As you explore Bolivia, you eventually come across convoys full of supplies for the Cartels. Each one is a side mission that helps out the rebel forces and unlocks more skills. In order to complete the mission, you have to stop the convoy and tag it for pickup. However, there is a large transport truck and two or three support vehicles standing in your way. Shooting out the tires or killing the driver is fairly difficult without the proper vehicle, but luckily your team more than makes up the difference.
I attempted to stop a convoy early on in my playtime before I had learned the different systems. This first convoy takeover ended miserably as I rolled up with a van and tried to run the truck off the road. Instead of knocking the truck from its course, I instead ended up across the road where the bandits shot me to death and blew up my vehicle.
The next attempt was quite different as I drove up in a truck with a prepared squad. Instead of ramming the convoy, I instead tapped the D Pad to start the assault. All three team members leaned out the window and opened fire on the truck, disabling it within moments and destroying two of the support vehicles. All I had to do was hop out of the car and tag the convoy for pickup. This was the easiest side mission to complete once I approached it from the right perspective.
Convoy is down.
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands releases March 7th. Will you be picking it up?
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