Ghost Recon: Future Soldier – What the hell?

I was feeling for some casual tactical pop-a-mole, so I popped the Ghost Recon: Future Soldier disc into the good old Xbox 360—a game I bought for this specific reason months ago. What I didn’t expect was that the series had turned so casual, it now ventured into Call of Duty territory. It had become so casual that the incredibly heavily scripted nature of a CoD campaign was now part of the Ghost Recon franchise. I was actually taken aback a little, since this is the opposite of what the series once was.

Future tech
One of the few good things about Ghost Recon: Future Soldier is the setting and the story. It’s very Tom Clancy-esque with the latest batch of ad‑hoc terrorists looking to blow up America, or something along those lines. I might come off as dismissive, but I genuinely enjoy this kind of simple setup, and with the near‑future cyberpunk tech, the game certainly had me hooked narratively. Lotus position acquired—let the twists and turns wash over me. Well, if it wasn’t for the gameplay…

Scripted action
Beyond having the game throw suicidal mooks at you at every turn, which by itself lowers the tension and believability of the setting, it’s also jam-packed with scripted action scenes that just don’t work. At least on the hardest setting, where it throws so much junk at you that it’s impossible to get by unscathed. The main problem is that the devs use a “cool & slick” escort-hostage segment often, which locks your movement to something scripted, where you can only aim and nothing else. It becomes a shooting gallery for a few minutes, with the game controlling your movements. It keeps the damage settings you chose, and on hard, you die in a few shots. This makes these sections incredibly stupid, since you can’t take cover. And a few times, I even died in the cutscene transition.

This wouldn’t be so much of an issue, besides being an annoyance, if the rest of the game was enjoyable. But it has such a schizophrenic design that it’s hard to tell what the genre is even meant to be. So, while the game wants you to blast humans to kingdom come, it’s also loaded with forced stealth—if spotted, instant failure kind of deal. With all this, Ghost Recon: Future Soldier gives you so little freedom and decision-making, it becomes mind-numbingly boring faster than you can reload your Goblin assault rifle. 

Who is in the lead?
What makes this worse is that you, the player, are not even the leader of the squad. I was utterly amazed by this when I realized I would never be in charge. You have zero control over any kind of squad movement—the rest of the group just loosely follow you or take the lead in the direction of the objective. You can order who to shoot at times, but forget setting up any kind of ambushes or defensive positions. The game puts no trust in the player, much like the damn Call of Duty campaigns, where the only gameplay is to shoot endless mercenaries in the gut until you hit the end screen.

I don’t have much else to say in this rant, other than that I’m extremely displeased, and I didn’t even have high expectations going in. I’m glad the series made a minor course correction since this release, even if it never got back to the simulation aspect of the series of old. Ghost Recon: Future Soldier is an utter abomination and a total letdown.

Thanks for reading.

– Thomas