The game is presented similarly to every other shooter out there, with fast wizzing pictures and newspaper cutous filling the cutscenes as there are unnaturally quick in out and zooms of various countries on a map, nothing you haven’t ever seen before, however while there is a lack of originality in the cut scenes and the menus, the campaign more than makes up for it in terms of style. The visual sheen of the locations, vehicles and weapons all jump off the screen, with each set piece becoming more and more visually arresting as the game progresses. Yes, it completely creams ‘CoD’ in this department. In terms of visuals, ‘GR:FS’ really holds its own in most areas. If you stay in cover long enough though, you’ll regenerate automatically – surprise, surprise – and from there everything should be roses.
While in cover, you can be suppressed, for example if you’re under fire by an enemy, your field of vision decreases – common ‘screen covered in blood’ sitch – and the camera will shake, making it difficult to return fire. They’re never far away but it certainly keeps you on your toes. As the cover can deteririate while you’re under attack, you’re forced to search for other spots you can hide behind. The cover physics are something special on this game, ensuring you’re quick thinking and moving. Everything here is presented a pure futuristic sheen, from the neon blue lights coming from every characters eyeballs to the monstrous Augmented Reality, but more on that later. It’s no secret ‘FS’ is hanging its hat on the inclusion of apparently genuine future military tech, and it makes no secret of that fact.
The game draws from both series amicably and seems to grab the best moments from each and smash them together so expertly. Specifically, ‘Ghost Recon: Future Soldier’.
The only way I can explain ‘Ghost Recon’ to anyone who hasn’t played it is imagine ‘Battlefield 3’ and ‘Crysis’ getting together for one steamy night of war torn love making under a pile of rubble they used to call their home and giving birth to a incomprehensible hybrid of the two. 'STUDS UP?! REF, SERIOUSLY? WHAT?! WHO IS PAYING YOU? DROGBA? TERRY?' After having a brief dalliance with ‘FS’ at last years Eurogamer Expo and very much enjoying it, I was properly pumped to get my hands on this and see what those extra months had done to the game, and whether the prolonged development time was worth it. The latest in the series seems to have been in development for a long time, longer than any ‘Ghost Recon’ I can remember, and the hype surrounding this game was massive.
Here we are then with ‘Ghost Recon: Future Soldier’, the twelfth(!) game in the series (three ahead of CoD, if you’re counting) and released yearly without hesitation – the series took a break from the major consoles last year, instead landing on 3DS with the underrated ‘Shadow Wars’ – to generally high acclaim. Well, firstly it’s not an FPS, it’s a TPS. Luckily, ‘Ghost Recon’ isn’t one of those franchises. You see, there are quite literally an absolute mega-frickin’-ton of FPS’ out there for us as consumers to delve headfirst into, and while we seem to continuously buy those titles of which we are comfortable with and know they will bring us the usual crash bang wallop they so predictably provide, those which dare to do something new, innovative and interesting are normally the ones left on the side to gather dust on the shelves of our favourite video game stores. Which one I hear you ask? Well, namely, that of the first person shooter. It’s fair to say there is an over-saturation of a particular gaming genre on the market at the moment. Does Ubisoft’s flagship shooter still hold up? Well, yes.