Ghost Recon: Breakpoint Is A Military Style Shooter
During the Cold War the U.S. set up bunkers across the fictional archipelago Auroa where it slowly gathered homesteaders who stayed to live off the rich landscape for generations after. Now it’s home to a massive tech company that’s been forcefully overtaken by a private military contractor.
Enter Nomad. Brought to the archipelago in search of information on a U.S. ship that was destroyed coming from the island, he(or she as my first play through was) comes crashing down in her squad’s chopper from a swarm of tiny drones.
A brutal crash immediately gives way to a gritty escape from Sentinel patrols attempting to ensure no one walks away alive. They didn’t count on Nomad. Making your way from the wreckage of a cold war era airfield, you find yourself among a group of homesteaders tucked away in a mountain. Their clandestine home is known as Erehwon.
A vending machine… of death!
Tom Clancy Finds A Home In Modern Science-Fiction
Breakpoint’s story adapts a tried and true Ghost Recon feel through a forced science-fiction filter. I don’t use forced as a pejorative either. The overlying lesson to the story is how quickly the game of war changes as technology grows, whether we like it or not. Nomad’s previous operations in Bolivia(Ghost Recon: Wildlands) never saw anything like drones that replace the enemy entirely.
As terrifying as humans can be, automated machines designed to kill humans using AI is far more terrifying. What happens when the AI no longer obeys commands? You’ll find out.
Ubisoft has definitely taken on the legacy of Tom Clancy reminding us things in war aren’t always black in white. Especially when you consider even basic enemy dialogue is designed to humanize your target. Sentinel soldiers aren’t just faceless cloned troops. They can be sleazy money hungry sociopaths for the most part, but human nontheless.
You’re shooting, stabbing, exploding, and sometimes eviscerating men who may have simply signed up hoping for good pay. They talk about their wives and their friend’s kids. Chattering to their squad mates about how messed up everything has gotten. Engaging in close quarters combat often reminds you they’re fighting for their lives just as much as you are.
Just as any good sci-fi story should, it makes you think. Even the main antagonist is someone Nomad knows very well. On the other end of the barrel is not only someone Nomad knew, but they had saved her life in combat before.
With the rough year 2020 has turned out to be, I find myself having a hard time emotionally stomaching the violence and grey area of morality. That, to me, is exactly what makes Ghost Recon Breakpoint so phenomenal. A video game is a piece of art in itself and Tom Clancy has always been about the art of storytelling. Stories absolutely should make you feel things.
My loadout of choice. Bullpup PDR, TAC50, and M9.
Breakpoint Gameplay: A Casual Perspective
I am not a particularly “hardcore” gamer anymore. I don’t sit around and grind away at a game for that next great piece of loot. It’s a dead horse that I have tried to bury so many times, but it just keeps being re-summoned from the pit of meaningless despair so many times that I’ve gotten used to the stench. It seems like every game now has some sort of loot mechanic driving the majority of your game time and I personally am getting quite sick of it.
I did still dip into the gear level system for quite some time and it wasn’t an entirely unpleasant experience for me personally. The short of it is I didn’t have to grind to keep the guns I wanted, materials to upgrade them were more plentiful from dismantling, and stat optimization definitely changed some strategies in combat. The main downside was having to replace old equipment constantly which means your stats change all the time anyway, and having to break everything down does get to be tedious at times. All in all it definitely didn’t ruin the game for me like so many others have reported.
For my first play through however I chose to keep gear level off and play based on the guns I enjoy using consistently. Ghost Mode definitely made the experience more immersive and in line with the traditional Tom Clancy narrative. So if you’re looking for a less loot-centric experience, it is definitely available.
Keep in mind the game was not released with Immersive mode and a lot of the game design was based around a loot system. You may run into small snags with things like accumulating parts to upgrade your weapons. I found this extremely difficult compared to breaking down weapons for parts. The only raid currently in the game is also only available with a certain gear score.
The good news: After defeating the final boss and switching to Loot Mode, I was given 200+ item level gear right off the bat. If you play your first time through for the narrative and remove loot, you can absolutely turn loot on after you’ve completed the story to give the loot a try without being at square one. This was a genius move on Ubisoft’s part!
Ghost Experience Parameters menu. You can customize further from here.
Perhaps my favorite part of this game is how much customization there is for your game play with Ghost Parameters. You can change everything from the loot marker icons, the size of different UI aspects, how many bandages you can carry, how smart the enemies are, and even how your health regenerates. Not only are all of these game parameters tweakable, they only apply to you even in multiplayer sessions.
If your friend likes a hardcore experience where every shot is felt and every mistake is punished, he can play with you while enemies bow beneath your ability to take far more shots than your friend. Or in my case I like to play normally but my wife wants to tag along for funsies, so she doesn’t have to feel the same pressure I do if she doesn’t want to.
As an avid military shooter fan this makes me immensely happy to know that I can invite my friends who aren’t terribly into hardcore shooters and still have a good time with them. I love playing with my wife because she’s never been an overly tactical player. I’ve called her Rambo many times for her propensity to run in and figure out the details later and it can be quite hilarious to watch… most of the time. I can’t say it hasn’t gotten me into trouble too, but that’s the risk we take to have some fun right?
Nomad can be very crafty indeed.
The Future of Breakpoint: A Few Unprompted Suggestions
I see a hell of a lot of potential in this game. Not just because I’m an avid Tom Clancy, shooter, SciFi, and exploration based game nerd. The game has nearly everything I enjoy about games and I remain ever hopeful of the direction Ubisoft takes with it.
While I know my input only means so much to the overall process, I had a few suggestions to create a more entertaining and immersive experience. First off:
Bows. It seems silly in a Tom Clancy game, but I’ve seen a few shooters utilize a bow in combat effectively. Is it the most effective method? Definitely not. But they’re silent, they’re accessible to people without 3D printers, and it really hits home the concept of survival.
One of my favorite survival based games is Tomb Raider by Square Enix. It was absolutely brutal and pointed out how easily things can go wrong in a survival situation. Despite having a shotgun, rifle, and handgun in that game I used a bow 90% of the time.
Partly because that’s my play style. Mostly because ammunition for the bow was far more plentiful than the rifle, shotgun, or handgun. Augmenting an arrow on Auroa could be done in a plethora of simple ways with gear Nomad already has available. Creating tips that make extra noise to divert an enemy, incendiary for crowd control or a make-shift flare, or even acid tips for limited effectiveness against drones.
Traps. How easy would it be to implement a system of creating rope or twine to trigger any sort of grenade or flash bang? Hell, even a sensor grenade attached to a tripwire could alert you to how many enemies may be incoming without alerting them of your knowledge. While I don’t see this being used as much in PvE, I can definitely see the PvP crowd getting behind this.
How about allowing more versatility with the Underbarrel Grenade Launcher? Why not allow us to collect EMP, Incendiary, Concussive, Sensor, or even Smoke Screen rounds for the MGL or Underbarrel launcher? It’s a simple concept that I believe should absolutely be explored!
More Rebel Commands! Something I’ve seen in nearly every blog post on this game is the addition of more rebel based support commands such as calling extra NPC support, calling a distraction, or scouting out a base for enemy positions. I don’t need to detail this much. Pretty sure Ubisoft already has it in mind.
Making your drone a real superpower. With Sentinel toting around all of this fancy tech, why is Nomad stuck with a simple recon drone? Is there really no support drone for Nomad? Sure, Engineer class introduced an attack drone, but I’ve honestly found it to be pretty fraggle rockin’ useless in combat. By the time this thing gets one enemy down I’ve cleared five or six. At best it’s an extra target to keep the enemy off me. The medic drone also feels rather useless when I’m playing by myself more often than not.
Why not take that drone and make it a bit more functional like in Wildlands? Not just EMP, noise maker, or explosive either. Have a persistent drone that follows Nomad around. It can even have a fun AI that makes it it’s own character and can be customized to fit the player’s style.
More of a sniper? How about a perk that can generate a crude camouflage hologram that reduces an enemy sniper’s chance to spot you while stationary.
Thinkin’ of blowing some stuff up as engineer? How about an augment that you can attach any type of c4 or grenade and use the drone to drop it directly over the target?
Even a close quarters Panther or Echelon could find use in a drone that can either have an innate automatic marking feature, or a taser ability that stuns a secondary target to allow you to CQC a duo of sentinel patrols without being detected.
Assault types could have a directed sound or strobe light pulse to keep attacking enemies disoriented.
These are some minor suggestions and hopefully it gives you a better idea to the potential having a drone companion that you can upgrade and augment. I feel like this would be a better place to center the loot system, as well as providing an opportunity to dig into the story concepts behind a super soldier having their own super drone.
Re-customized Nomad with custom AI teammates.
The Ever Changing Auroan Struggle
All in all, Ghost Recon Breakpoint has continued to provide a constant stream of valuable content. I tend to play at least once a day to sharpen my tactical thinking, situational awareness, and even help hone my eyes, ears, and navigational skills. I’ve always been a firm believer that video games can teach us many things.
There’s no substitute for real experience for sure, but simulation is one of many ways we hone our skills, and this game does a great job at it. I enjoy camping and foraging in real life and my ability to spot plants and even animals amid natural settings has gotten considerably better during my time outside thanks to this play style.
Not to mention how much perspective it can glean from conflict and how the road to hell can be paved with good intentions. That’s important to remember during a time where everyone is feeling the pressure of humanity as a maturing species.
While I enjoy that Nomad tends to fit well in the every-man dynamic, I feel like he/she should struggle more with this as well. Even Holt mentions how Bolivia was pretty straight forward on who the bad guy was.
Fighting your old friends has them re-thinking what the true sides of war look like. I would very much welcome a story arc that shows Nomad exactly what Walker was planning with Wonderland, and that causes conflict within Nomad. Walker seemed to believe in what he did, and despite Nomad seeing his psychological breakdown as it happened, it should raise a lot of questions of what Walker’s perspective was.
I still have quite a bit of game to play in terms of finding world collectibles and a few side missions to complete however, so there is still much more for me to find. I managed to get my wife playing with me as well from time to time despite military shooters being nowhere on her game radar and she’s enjoyed the story tremendously.
We even crack jokes during rough times about how our stomach is all acidy and we just want some fish tacos. I feel like I could touch a lot on how intriguing the supporting characters in Erehwon have been, but I’m running out of wall to place my text.
My overall assessment of Ghost Recon Breakpoint is I have enjoyed it thoroughly and will likely be playing regularly for a long time to come. While I recognize the game had a rough start, I think that’s every game these days. It doesn’t help when publishing companies are pressuring deadlines that aren’t conducive to releasing a complete product, and even they have non-stop pressure coming from gamers themselves to adhere to deadlines that are made before full development is often even in view.
It’s a vicious circle of everyone wants something from everyone else but no-one has any patience to allow the art that is the game to flourish. Don’t worry though Ubisoft, there are plenty of us out there who see the true art you are trying to create. Keep up the great work, I look forward to seeing what you have planned!
Note On Graphics: I do not have a beast computer, so please know I took screenshots myself for this post and they are not representative of full game graphics quality. Trust me. It looks much nicer on a better computer!
