Ghost Recon: Breakpoint - The Definitive Review
About that time when Ubisoft did something good
Of all the games I’ve dedicated nearly 200 hours to, Ghost Recon: Breakpoint must be the most criminally underrated. Launching as a buggy and initially mediocre attempt to hybridise the merciless slaughter of thousands of brown men in Ghost Recon: Wildlands with the ruthlessly hyper-commercialised structures and revenue channels of The Division, Breakpoint exists as a symbol of Ubisoft’s hubris and greed within videogame culture, which is much worse a reputation than it actually deserves. The fact is Ghost Recon Breakpoint underwent some of the most radical re-tuning one could imagine for a flailing and entirely unwelcome looter-shooter. In some mad pique of generosity, Ubisoft launched a series of patches (under the umbrella of ‘Ghost Experience’) that allow the player to dispense with the weapon-levelled nonsense of The Division and open up the game as a kind of highly configurable spec-ops open-worlder. Mystifyingly, this superb transformation seems to have been largely ignored by both the media and the players. Even the game’s Wikipedia entry fails to mention it. Yet, it makes Breakpoint one of the very best of all Ubisoft’s open-worlders. Play in co-op with distinct and nicely interlocking character classes, run in singleplayer with a team of your config a la Wildlands, or simply go it alone in solo, Solid Snake style. And yet in comparison to perhaps its deepest spiritual inspiration, Metal Gear Solid V, it offers a truly enormous map with a colossal amount of content.
Breakpoint’s bumpy start cemented a seemingly indelible reputation that’s proved itself hard to shift. Long after I’d rinsed the game’s singleplayer content all the way down to the daily proc-gen resistance missions, I saw clips of it popping up on TikTok. Some dude in Europe was cosplaying it as a serious soldier-sim, a kind of more clip-friendly take on ARMA, sprawling around in the mud while doing HUD-less takedowns of the game’s randomly-spawning patrols. These clips highlighted the great combat systems and Breakpoint’s wonderful affordance of biomes, showing brutal murder by firearms or bladed weapons in all sorts of locales. And yet, once the game’s name was revealed, there’d always be a cadre of commenters happy to chip in that Ghost Recon: Wildlands was the better game. Of course, they’re sadly mistaken. Wildlands is a cartoon in comparison, not to mention filled with some of the most obnoxious bullshit ever to grace a game claiming to be more on the side of a combat sim than it is Grand Theft Auto. Even though it’s almost Watch Dogs Auto: Spec Ops - The Lines (Of Cocaine - do you get it?!?!?). And on top of that, Wildlands was so incredibly insulting, on so many levels, that the Bolivian government issued a statement condemning it. The response letter from one of Wildland’s writers, Lewis Manalo, is really something to behold1. In between arguments from authority, a vague confession about chewing coca leaves and a flat refusal to admit he made any mistakes, Manalo writes as if afflicted by a narcissistic injury. His response handwaves the Bolivian government’s consternation while getting down to the nitty gritty of telling game reviewers that their opinions are wrong and bad, spending more time justifying his use of the term ‘shitballs’ as a player bark2 than addressing the entirely valid critiques of the game’s setting and story. Lewis makes the claim that “Many players struggle with understanding that the narrative is not the kind of apolitical, superficial narrative that they were sold. Many struggle to understand that though some characters are ridiculous and that they make jokes, the story itself is not a joke.” And yet, the story is an absolute joke. It’s terrible. The basic premise alone is so comically ridiculous that it would be infuriating if it wasn’t so stupendously silly. Essentially, it attempts to rationalise the idea that a drug cartel so powerful that it dominates an entire South American nation to the point where the fucking army won’t directly confront it can be taken down by four spec-ops soliders from the USA. Manalo’s seeming obliviousness to this utterly ludicrous idea is highlighted by his retort to Eurogamer’s Edwin Evans-Thirlwell’s absolutely bang-on remark that this setup reads like a ‘5am Trump Tweet’. Lewis fires back with “as if no other president had ever been capable of sending troops overseas.” I was somewhat dumbfounded by the Trumpian combo of missing the point and doubling down while refusing to admit fault. And despite the general critical consensus3 from highly respected outlets that the narrative was less than stellar and, in a lot ways, exploitative and sensationalist, Manalo maintains that he and the team delivered “a world-class narrative for a AAA video game”. Dare I deploy the cliche that cocaine is one hell of a drug? Not to be trapped in his past, Manalo closes by fitting in the PR objective of mentioning the next game to come: “After my work on Ghost Recon: Wildlands, I was given the opportunity to be lead writer on Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, and with more cinematics and dialogue choices, Breakpoint will prove to be a different kind of narrative experience than that of Wildlands”. GYAC, reader; it really fucking wasn’t.
Ghost Recon Breakpoint’s story is by far its weakest aspect. It’s some muddled confusion of classic Clancy spec-ops wankfestery crossed with Modern Warfare-esque global peril and treacherous in-fighting, taking place on a fictional island in the South Pacific that miraculously has every biome on Earth aside true desert4. Here, an old ally of the player’s character has become a master baddie, part of some conspiracy to take over the island, which had been colonised by a stereotypical techbro billionaire, to develop AI drones for warfare. This combination of dubious colonialism and laughably silly sci-fi doom-mongering is expressed in the form of indestructible robot megatanks that wouldn’t be out of place in a Killzone or Halo set piece, replete with specifically weak armoured spots that reveal vulnerable innards to snipe out for massive damage and so forth. So far, so tiresome. As you meander through the story missions and their broadly inconsequential outcomes for anything other than doling out another chunk of story, you end up confronting your old buddy, who somehow has an actual sci-fi force-field. And thus, the big boss fight happens and thank fuck, the fucking story is over. Let’s just be charitable and say I’m glad Breakpoint’s plot was so pedestrian and unengaging, as I really didn’t want to go through the same tasteless and tone-deaf hoops that Wildlands dragged me through. I still recoil at the side content available in Wildlands’ starting area, where the first expositional audio tape you’ll probably get near is a conversation between two torturers about a victim’s post-mortem penile erection. Is it scene-setting? Is it supposed to make you hate the torturers that are the opening stage’s key bosses? Or is it just gross and exploitative puriency? Taking into account that we know the disposition of at least one of the writers, I’ll leave it to you, dear reader, to decide for yourself.
In the late 1990s and through to the early 2000s, I was deeply attached to the PC-based tactical FPS. I adored them after being brutally spanked by Rainbow Six, and devoured whatever I could get my hands on. Delta Force, the original Spec Ops, Hidden and Dangerous and, naturally, the original Ghost Recon. They all had this respect for the single bullet kill, that you were just as vulnerable to a single-shot takedown as the enemies you faced. This stark equality set a completely different tone of danger to the run-and-gun delights of Doom, Half Life etc. Despite nearly a quarter of a century passing, I have vivid memories of specific times and places in these games. Sitting under a snow-laden tree on the first mission of Hidden and Dangerous 2 and watching for patrols, seeing my team slaughtered one-by-one by a sniper in a Jacovican stairway in Rainbow Six Urban Operations, picking my way through the deserted streets of Tbilisi in Ghost Recon. But one memory stands clear above the others. It’s from a bonus mission in Operation Flashpoint, where you’re tasked with destroying a convoy. You start with a small team and a loadout of mines and rocket launchers. Spawning next to a hillside, you mine the road and run up the hill to hide in the bushes, rockets at the ready. It’s raining heavily as you hear the convoy approach, as you anxiously wait for it all to kick off. I remember feeling a tangible sense of being in a place, rather than in a game. Sat there, waiting, with teammates left and right, the sense of realism was simply superb. You could almost feel the wetness, smell the rain. It was so evocative. Naturally, when the mines detonated and we started launching our shoulder-mounted munitions to complete the task in admirable style, it felt triumphant. A plan well-executed with a sense that nothing grandiose or overblown had happened to flatter us. This was how it would be, it felt. Or as close as possible with the tech of the time. Breakpoint has all those moments in dizzying multitudes5. And take it from me, a tactical FPS obsessive: this game is second only to Metal Gear Solid 5 for brilliance. You think I’m fucking with you? I am not fucking with you. The Phantom Pain certainly edges Breakpoint in systemic and meta-economic terms, but Breakpoint has the environments and the profusion of opportunity to flex. You can recreate that Flashpoint mission almost at will in Breakpoint, as there are roaming cash and weapon trucks to ambush. You can find a glorious variety of occupied installations, bases, settlements to take on. And playing the game as a kind of over-specced partisan, a hyper-guerilla, is where the game absolutely shines. And in solo, it removes so much of the atmosphere-breaking jank of Wildlands’ immortal and invisible-to-the-enemy teammates.
The emergent journey from Breakpoint’s opening helicopter crash is so much better than its formal story, it almost defies belief. Once past the forced parts of getting to Erewhon, the central resistance hideout of Breakpoint, the game is entirely open. Naturally, my first impulse is to get gear. I need the best sniper rifle. And I need the best submachine gun for closer work, and my overriding priority is finding them. What’s beautiful in Breakpoint is that by using the world map and the drone, you can effectively survey the island and unlock fast-travel bivouac points. This means you can criss-cross the regions in impressive speed and find the locales where all the equipment is held. I’m not joking when I say I spent a good 60 hours just in gear acquisition alone, and that this netted me more than enough skill points to upgrade my character into a thoroughly pleasing and capable stealth bastard. And yah, of course I got the best sniper rifle - after trying them all!6 Breakpoint’s class system allows fun special techniques, with the stealth-perv Echelon class aping the Conviction-era Sam Fisher’s sonar for marking enemies. Progression with class-specific combat challenges grants various goodies per tier, including exclusive class-specific clothing. And it’s worth mentioning that Breakpoint offers world-leading dress-up options in its genre7. And yes, you have to get some pieces of clothing from locations filled with enemies. Oh no, how awful. What I loved was that sense of freely wandering the island to get stuff that helps me, and getting into scrapes both large and small on the way. The resulting emergent drama was, frankly, superb. Though a lot of that was down to my remarkable carelessness creating messes I had to get out of. However I wasn’t playing a purely mission-less path - the game has plenty of side missions with perfectly valuable rewards. If you open up the right resistance quest line, you complete a series of surprisingly decent missions to unlock a laser designator for a single, slowly-rechargeable missile strike. This is wonderfully useful in improvisational assaults to acquire a fab new scope or suppressor, etc. Some of the story missions are nicely done too, though it’s the main thread where the fatiguing tendency towards boombast and sensationalism lies. The grittier meat of the game is much more grounded, although there are a few wacky side missions, presumably for the lols. Overall, the game is what I’d call ‘sequel-correct’, as in it represents a real growth from its predecessor. It’s an expansion of scope, of geography, of player affordances. The class system alone8, and how they all clearly mesh beautifully for co-op play, is a real standout innovation from the likes of Wildlands or even The Division. Speaking of Massive’s game, It’s almost fascinating to see how easily Breakpoint copes with weapon levelling turned off, as if it was nothing more than some flimsy artifice to artificially enforce grinding. The thought of going through Breakpoint with it turned on is, frankly, the stuff of nightmares.
Ghost Recon Breakpoint may have only popped into the mainstream gamer news thanks to borderline comedic dabblings with NFTs to add implausibly tiny ID numbers to a player’s armour, but it deserves so much more than to be seen as Ubisoft’s dumping ground for vogueish monetisation strats. With all that faff turned off, it’s a truly wonderful game. In fact, it’s one of my all-time favourites. Again, I feel the need to reiterate that I was rabid for tactical shooters in their glory years and Breakpoint does perhaps the best job we can expect in giving us a vast, modern open world full of tactical shooter opportunities. I still find the re-tuning of Ghost Experience to be one of the most remarkable acts of charity from a AAA publisher I’ve ever seen, particularly for a game that would have niche appeal at best. Just imagine if such practice was the industry default, and such fine-grain control was offered for the likes of Far Cry or Grand Theft Auto. For Breakpoint perhaps it was a smart contingency, planned from the start in case the looter-shooter service game bubble burst, or perhaps it’s just a sign that somewhere within Ubisoft’s French management, there are people who genuinely loved the tactical FPS and saw the Ghost Recon lineage as deserving a correctional loop back, as some way of approximating that stern, austere naturalism of the original. Certainly with the sheer volume and variety of trees and wooded areas in Breakpoint’s Aurora island recalls the original Ghost Recon’s opening stage. Arriving as Rainbow Six: Outdoors, the first mission of the first game is a taut trek through Ossetian woodland, where the enemies are difficult to see and one-shot lethal on first contact. In a way, the modified Breakpoint is a grand progression of that first mission. A wondrously unfolding fractal expansion of the primary proposition and, storyline aside, a return to that austerity which so elevated the original Clancy games beyond the arcade shooter melee. It certainly is when you tune the difficulty to be maximally aggressive. Being a lazy asshole, I naturally carried out my locust-like rampage of acquisition under a customised difficulty that emphasised leisure over challenge. However towards the end, and with a fully upgraded character than the bestest guns, I flicked everything to horrorshow and encountered a genuinely demanding world. Playing Breakpoint for this piece, that challenge was irresistible. Another beautiful option is the ability to reset the campaigns and start over, but with player progression and gear intact. Thus, I restarted the farewell campaign that was added in 2022, Operation Motherland.
My return to Breakpoint is pretty much guaranteed now. I love it that fucking much. The reset launched me with a single AI buddy, which in the interests of research I decided to keep, having done all of the original campaign completely solo, save the ludicrous ending boss fight. It’s a nice mix-up, but the AI teammate is so overpowered by default that it really does alter the overall difficulty, but not ruinously so. But there’s another imperative for going at Breakpoint one more time - it could be ended at any moment. Seemingly based on the same server architecture as The Division, it demands a login to Ubisoft servers before it can load the world map. There’s no real reason for this for singleplayer adventuring, as with the Hitman login, so it's a frustratingly present damoclean sword, always reminding you that you can only play this if Ubisoft allows you to. But it adds a certain romantic fatalism to the game. A sense that its uptime is precious, and more precious as each day passes. Ubisoft absolutely will shut it down one day, and Operation Motherland apparently was the very last thing the company would release for the game, with no hints of ever detaching it from the Ubisoft network. It’s fascinating to me that two of my supremely ultimate most-loved games are broadly the same template and share quasi-tragic stories. Metal Gear Solid V’s truncated content carries a similar vibe to Breakpoint’s failure as a monetisation engine and retooling as an unloved top-tier open-world tactical shooter. There’s something magic between the tensions of developer and publisher, of creative studio vs exec suite, where the creative carves out an improbable, glorious triumph. Somehow the game finds some nugget of transcendence from the oppression of the commercial imperative and the imposition of user-hostile flaws from a managerial class that can only understand videogames as financial assets.
In the end, the modded and patched Breakpoint really is a maturation of the sloppy, arcadey reboot of Wildlands. Gone are the edgy politicking and infantile super-soldier theatrics, even if Breakpoint maintains the wildly implausible profligacy of infinitely-available helicopters and the total impunity to rain rockets on civilian villages without consequence. We can be thankful that the enemies shifted to identikit PMC operators9 and rogue-state armies, as Wildlands’ glee in presenting thousands of young Latino men for you to slaughter carried a certain resonance10 that should cause you to feel profoundly uncomfortable just by realising what that game encouraged. And let’s not forget the political justification for this, as approved by corporate for publication, coming from a hyperbolic and essentially insulting spec-ops-uber-alles narrative, whatever its political bent or satirical-or-not intention. We can be most thankful that Breakpoint’s story just jumped off the rails into outright sci-fi silliness with its own indulgences and can be safely ignored. But it irks me slightly that Ubisoft missed the greatest trick of all. If I had my way, and could send Breakpoint off into that good night, but it would not be sent gently. I would free it of the servers, turn off enemy respawning and drop in a roguelike clear-the-island mode. Kill all enemies in each region, one-by-one, until none are left. If you clear a region without dying, it stays cleared. You carry on until all the threats are gone. It’s that simple, that pure. The reward would be seeing Aurora’s beautiful biomes cleansed of militarist fantasy, for once and or all. For me, this also feels like the ultimate pinnacle of the stealth mandate within the tactical shooter, wherein you assure mission success by killing everyone at minimal risk to yourself. So the ultimate task is to literally kill them all. Despite the broken faux-realism that Ghost Recon Breakpoint upholds, the idea that the occupying force can actually be eliminated carries a different sense of the truth, and an entirely different idea of how a super-soldier can operate in a truly mature context. To make that impossible, infinitely respawning enemy into a finite, manageable army is to make the ultimate task attainable, if nonetheless long and arduous. But given the excellence of the game’s systems and its untapped and under-appreciated potential, it’s a long march I’d be delighted to indulge.
[21]
I would say that given the timing of this furore, and Ubisoft's utter ambivalence to towards it, that the the company was deep in its 'led by narcissistic abusive sociopaths' phase, as described in my previous piece on Splinter Cell. A dusting of cocaine across the the proceedings probably helps, too. As an ex-PR Professional, I read the letter and just cringe. It's so off-key, so defiantly indignant, it has a Trumpian vibe all of its own that makes me question not only Manalo's suitability as a public spokesperson, but the credibility of the team that must have approved this letter for publication. Perhaps that's the sociopathy of the company rubbing off on the people within it.
As a fine example of just how great Ghost Recon Wildlands is slapstick comedy, my player had just completed an extremely professional and disciplined clear-out of a mission locale and upon leaving by car, accidentally plunged off a cliff. We rolled, we bounced, we fell hundreds of metres and came to rest on some piece of road, seemingly unharmed. The only noise made by any of the team was during one of the rolls, when my character declared - in full deadpan - the immortal word 'shitballs'. Hey Lewis - it was never the term, it was how it was used.
I strongly recommend - no - flatly demand you watch Noah Caldwell-Gervais's excellent Wildlands review, which can be found here.
This really is the strong point of the world map, and pushes it way beyond the faux-Bolivia of Wildlands. I will happily trade the dusty hills and white salt flats for the richness of Breakpoint's map. You can be in rainforest for one mission, then freezing mountains the next. Swampy everglades, alpine woodland, sweeping grass plains. It really is a splendid canvas - and that's without mentioning the really quite awesome volcanic island with its basalted lava plains and thick, steamy jungle. It’s as if the team knew they could do an open world with every biome, so they did. And in doing so, made a kind of universal combat environment. Magnifique.
Well, aside the ‘getting your whole team slaughtered by one sniper’ part.
I spent a lot of time experimenting with different loadouts and after switching from easy grind mode to hardcore hyper-realism difficulty, actually ended up with the most powerful suppressed sniper rifle (M82) paired with a marksman's suppressed semi-auto rifle. The key difference being that if you end up having to fight at close range, you've really fucked up and will probably die if you don't kill everyone close to you really quickly. The SMGs were a bit too inaccurate and lacking in stopping power at intermediate range to work. However an M110 marksman rifle on 3-shot burst with an ACOG scope works beautifully, plus it has 15 rounds to the sniper's 5.
I cannot express how important dress-up options are in this kind of game. I was running in full jet-black scuba gear with a jet fighter pilot helmet at one point and looked fucking incredible.
As previously mentioned, I played as Fourth Echelon, the Sam Fisher hyper-stealth class. Looking at the sniper and drone operator classes, you can see absolutely delicious interplays of abilities between the three that ignite a fizzy enthusiasm to see them all working together. Not that I can muster three buddies to give enough shits to join in, despite the game offering completely free trials to the player's friends. It's been offering this for nearly four years. :(
Given the fucking robo-tanks and massive quasi-mecha boss drones, it doesn't seem too much of a stretch to justify the infinitely respawning PMCs by just having aliens invade the island and setting up cloning facilities. At least then there'd be an actual, textural reason for the constant presence aside the formal one presented in the game, which appears to be 'videogames lol'.
I think the term we're looking for might be 'structurally racist'.