Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands is an open-world, campaign-driven, third/first-person shooter.  It is the 15th installment in the Ghost Recon series, which began in 2001 with Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon.  The series is inspired by the Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon book series. The game takes place in modern day Bolivia and opens with the bombing of the U.S. embassy there. The story features four U.S. spec ops troopers who are tasked with the destruction of a drug cartel that has gained political and military control over Bolivia. Wildlands strives for tactical realism and succeeds for the most part.

In terms of narrative the story arc of the game, it is very much what you would expect but with a few twists, such as one of your allies turning against you near the end of the campaign. The plot opens with your character, codenamed Nomad, arriving in Bolivia to meet the rest of your team. Your character arrives with an NPC (nonplayer character) named Karen Bowman. Throughout the game, Bowman is the voice in your ear, giving you instructions and intel from command. You arrive and meet the rest of your team, NPCs named Midas, Holt, and Weaver. You are known as Ghosts and are given clearance to take down the cartel by any means, so long as those means don’t implicate the U.S. Government in any way. From there the story is different depending on your player choices; you can start anywhere. If you want to begin by dismantling the cartels smuggling branch, you can do just that, gathering info and targeting bosses until the elusive leader of that branch is drawn out where you can either kill them or offer them witness protection back stateside in exchange for information on the cartels leader, El Sueño. There are 4 branches in the cartel: smuggling, production, security, and influence. Eventually, when you have made enough progress dismantling various branches, you draw out El Sueño, and the end game ensues along with a twist that the leader of the rebellion who has been assisting you in your fight against the cartel betrays you and kidnaps Bowman. His reasoning is that his rebel group must be the ones to defeat Sueño in order to avoid looking like a puppet of the U.S. Government. The ending depends on whether the Ghosts fully dismantled the cartel. If remnants of the cartel remain, Bowman will execute El Sueño, causing her to get into trouble with the CIA who then arrest her for murdering El Sueño, whom they want to cut a deal with for information on other cartels. She states that she does not regret her actions in doing so, due to fearing that El Sueño would become a dictator with the United States backing without her intervention. The other ending is if the Ghosts have fully dismantled the cartel and have taken down others involved with Santa Blanca, Bowman takes El Sueño into protective custody. El Sueño provides further intelligence on other drug cartels, terrorist groups, arms smugglers, and the Ghosts head home.

Ghost Recon Wildlands has one of the best open-world environments I have ever had the pleasure to play through. With twenty one different regions to explore, the Wildlands is a very diverse landscape that seamlessly blends from mountains to jungles to deserts. The texture of objects in the game environment is stunning. The NPCs have fairly decent pathing and do an acceptable job at creating a live world. The weather mechanics, while not groundbreaking, are quite good and add to the game environment quite well.

The controls for player movement and interaction are fairly comprehensive and robust, allowing for easy control of your character and NPCs under the command of your character. Specifically, the way in which you can interface with your NPC teammates is done very well. You press a keybind to bring up a list of actions you can then impart onto your units such as go there, regroup, fire on that position, eliminate that vehicle, and several other orders.

Ghost Recon Wildlands has a player vs player gamemode (PVP) that has its merits as well as the base game, with several game modes from team deathmatch to various iterations of objective control. The PVP portion of the game has pre-made classes with their own unique weapon loadouts and abilities, this is done for the sake of balancing combat and allowing the combat to continuously feel diverse. The player vs player game modes have a large assortment of maps on which to play, all in all creating a quite enjoyable experience.

I have played well over 400 hours in this game and the previous statements are reflections of my experience during that time. Most of my time in this game was accompanied by friends and I definitely feel that Wildlands is made much more enjoyable with company. I heartily recommend it to any one looking for a change from the stagnant gameplay and meta of shooters on the market today.