Final verdict: D-
Final playtime: Around 10 hours, mostly multiplayer

UuuuuggggghhhhGHGHGHGHHHHH. This game is just plain bad. No excuses, no sugar coating. If you like it you’re dumb and should be hated.

I’ve never been a big Tom Clancy fan. The last Splinter Cell was the only Tom Clancy I’ve ever vaguely enjoyed, and that wasn’t a particularly good game if I’m honest. But THIS? Holy fuck it’s bad.

Right off the bat any tiny scraps of hope I had for the game died when the opening “Press Start” screen actually led to another Press Start screen. I am not fucking with you. The game literally has two “press start” screens just to reach the main menu. No, SERIOUSLY. The game shows a screen with one of the protagonists on it, and says “Press start” but all that does is take you to another screen with a picture of one of the protagonists on it, which also says “Press start”. I’m sorry, but what the fuck?

That’s your first clue that the game is gonna have the worst interface ever created. Let me tell you that every menu in the game is horrifically bad. You know how since time immemorial, video game menus have been cyclical, and if you reach the bottom of the menu you can just press down to get straight back to the top again? Not in the world of Tom Clancy you can’t. Scroll all the way back up, son. You think that’s bad? Back in my day to get back to the top of a menu you’d have to walk there and back, in the driving rain and snow. Uphill both ways. No but honestly bitch please. How the fuck can anybody still have a menu like that?

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The entire interface throughout the game is like… it’s as if it’s infected with some kind of disease that makes it all bloated and waterlogged. Not only is it always painfully inconvenient to navigate any of the game’s menus, but their interface was something these faggots actually bragged about when trying to hype this game up. Why? I sure as shit don’t know, they have fuck all to be proud of. This game’s menu is nothing if it isn’t an example of everything a video game menu shouldn’t do. The devs particularly bragged about their “gunsmith” menu, which is just a circular menu showing all your guns and their attachments and stuff. They created this menu so that idiots who own a kinect will be able to tell their friends “Hey look it’s just like Minority Report!” What this means is that it’s an awkward-as-shit menu with or without kinect, and the loading times for just the menu are inexcusable, even when the game is installed. The entire interface though, on the whole, simply feels clunky, slow, inconvenient, and just… out of date. By like 30 years. I genuinely cannot understand how game developers of today haven’t learned how to make menus properly.

I’ve spent a shitload of time already talking only about how bad the menus are, so you’re probably thinking “Well menus don’t matter, Shepton’s just being a bitch about unimportant shit again!” Well. If you’re thinking that, first of all fuck you. But mainly you should see this terrible interface as a huge red flag. If the devs of this game couldn’t get the menu right, why the fuck would the game itself be any good? NOW you’re thinking like a true Shepton.

You’ll quickly notice when you start to play that the game has some major issues on the graphics side. I know, I know, graphics don’t matter. I’m always saying it in every review. But let me clarify. What I mean by that is the number of polygons and level of detail in the graphics don’t matter. What does matter is if characters, objects, cover, and other vitally important parts of scenery just become invisible randomly, or simply disappear if you move more than ten feet away from them. This is something that happens with alarming regularity in Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Future Soldier Ultimate Super Edition 12 The Revenge of Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Future Soldier. And again, this happens even with the game installed.

The game has a cover system, as you’d expect since that’s par for the course in third person shooters these days, and well it should be because cover systems are pretty damn good. But of course, the developers of this game in particular didn’t do any research into how cover systems work or what the purpose of a cover system is. You’re actually quite a lot better off just avoiding cover entirely in this game, because aiming over it, or trying to maneuver around it, or trying to actually use it to avoid damage won’t do you any good. Once you’re in cover, you’re sort of stuck to it in a really awkward way. You can’t quickly detach yourself from it like you can in Gears of War. And when it comes to aiming over it, it’s merely a hassle trying to line up a good angle due to the awkward way in which the game adjusts your character’s position and direction if you try to only adjust the camera. Let’s say you’re facing to the left by default, but you want to face right to get a more optimal view of a target. You turn your character right, but if you then attempt to aim, or try to turn the camera so much as a single pixel for a better view, your character will immediately turn back around and face the other direction, meaning your target is no longer in sight, or is at a bad angle, etcetera. It’s infuriating to say the least, and it frequently causes you to miss opportunities for kills.

I also felt from the first few matches of multiplayer that I took part in that the balance of the game was skewed. There’re two factions in the game that each have different basic weapons and equipment: Ghost team and Bodark team. But the Ghost team seems to start with really solid basic equipment, and the Bodark team’s starting gear seems extremely specific and less well-rounded in comparison. Ghost team starts with several really useful attachments already unlocked, and Bodark team essentially has raw, unmodified weapons with less useful attachments. Their starting weapons seem less easy to use and more difficult to control. Now, this may be somewhat of a minor point as you gain credits to unlock more attachments and edit your guns as you play, but it still felt wrong and frustrating to me. Playing as the Ghost team always felt like an advantage before I went on to unlock stuff for both factions.

Speaking of attachments and weapon modifications and the like, the entire system seems kinda flawed and pointless. There are certain attachments that seem to have no drawbacks and no catches, meaning there’s no reason not to unlock and attach them to your guns. Things like compensators for the muzzle, aiming lasers for enhanced accuracy, among other things. Sure, some of the gear has obvious drawbacks, but to me it felt like there were a few attachments that were just so good they made alternatives redundant.

I will admit, the gunsmith system is neat in the single player campaign. You feel like you’re progressing, unlocking worthwhile, valuable equipment. It’s nice to mess around with your guns, kit yourself out especially for the task ahead. But in multiplayer, it’s just a hassle. It means that if you want to be your best and use the equipment you really want, you’ll have to drop out between matches in order to purchase, select and upgrade all the weapons, classes and factions to your liking before having another match, because the menu is so fucking slow and clunky and retarded that it takes far more than the 60 seconds you get between games to actually make the changes you want to make.

The multiplayer is average at its best. It’s decent fun on occasion, but it’s got nothing on competitors like Gears of War 3 and whatever the latest two or three Call of Duty games are. Those are games that were built almost exclusively for their multiplayer. They’re smooth, honed, polished, precise, fast, and compared to ghost recon they’re also glitch-free. ’cause yeah. Ghost Recon got some ISSUES. I mentioned the pop-in problems earlier – those happen in multiplayer. A LOT. At one point a few friends and I were shooting the hell out of a guy we could see up ahead of us. We kept shooting and shooting but we weren’t hitting him. He was just sitting there but we weren’t hitting him. How? There’s three of us, aiming at this guy, firing, but nothing is happening. We figured it was a common glitch where the character model was just remaining on screen despite being already dead (because yeah, that happens a lot. You’ll kill a dude but their model will remain standing there, often still animated and moving as if alive, showing up on radar, etc). So we thought that was happening. So we moved in closer, and as we came within a few feet… ping! It turns out he was behind a wall that simply disappears if you get too far away from it. Uuuggggh. There’s very poor collision detection, also. Characters often phase through each other both online and off, even during scenes in the singleplayer campaign.

There’s three classes in the multiplayer. Engineer, Scout, and God (some people call the third class Rifleman for some reason). Engineer has the ability to throw sensors and toss up a UAV in order to highlight enemies on your HUD and radar, which can be a big advantage to the rest of the team, if they’re smarter than an amoeba. Scout has active camouflage and can sort of do a Predator thing where they’re kinda invisible, only you can totally see them and it’s really pretty useless. And the God class has a bulletproof vest which effectively gives him a shitload of extra health, except against headshots, but everybody sucks at aiming so for all intents and purposes God is just a really healthy nigga.

Essentially all I’m trying to say is that you shouldn’t buy this game. Or even rent it. Whether you realize it or not, you’ve played this game before under a dozen different names, only this is worse than all of those. It’s below average even at the best of times, and to drag it down even further it’s plagued with glitches, bugs, bad design choices, awful load times, and the absolute most sickening part of it is that if you want to use any of the online features you’re forced to sign up to Ubisoft’s shitty Uplay system.

Just skip it. Nobody cares and nobody will remember this game.

Final playtime: Around 10 hours, mostly multiplayer.

Final verdict: Ass.