Ghost Recon Breakpoint Review: A Cavalcade of Mindless Fetch Quests and Dull Action

There are plenty of military engagements in Breakpoint, but none of them are particularly engaging.

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint
Photo: Ubisoft

The last line spoken in the main campaign of Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint is meant to be a serious question: As your character, codenamed Nomad, looks out over the semi-liberated archipelago of Auroa, he or she asks, “All right, what’s next?” But, in reality, the question exposes how little there actually ever was to look forward to in Breakpoint. Players are as free to continue exploring Auroa as they’ve been from the beginning, so what’s next is the same as what’s been next for the previous 30 hours: more shooting and looting.

Despite the diversity of the 21 districts on Auroa and the various biomes you’ll encounter as you travel from flat swamplands to snowy mountains and deep jungles, Breakpoint adheres to a sadly repetitive structure. A target will be identified, you’ll locate said target, and then you’ll kill anyone who gets in your way. For a bit of variety, you can swap between classes, playing as a long-range Sharpshooter, stealth expert Panther, head-on Assault, or group-healing Medic, but because every mission can be completed the same way, it rarely makes a difference.

Even recon, which should be the bread-and-butter of this franchise, is taken scarcely more seriously than in 2017’s Ghost Recon Wildlands; the optional Exploration mode forces players to manually find each mission by following geographic descriptions. But once you’ve reached them, yellow dots pop up to show you exactly what you need to do, obviating the need for all that photographic intel you collect. Occasionally, you may have to leave one enemy alive as you infiltrate the area they’re stationed in, so that you can interrogate them for more information, but, in essence, the game’s core loop comes down to scouting, shooting, and salvaging. It’s a series of mindless fetch quests, punctuated by dull combat.

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Where other open-world games deliver on the fantasy and immediacy of amusement-park rides, Breakpoint establishes the crippling logistics of visiting the theme park itself. In Just Cause 4, you get a physics-defying grappling hook and perform roller-coaster-like stunts; in Breakpoint, you send up your reconnaissance drone to mark all of the targets in an area and, only after planning everything, can you start the “fun” of killing them. In Far Cry New Dawn, you solve environmental puzzles and sometimes face the sort of disorienting designs you’d find in a funhouse; in Breakpoint, you emulate patiently waiting in line as you queue up the fast-travel menu to the nearest bivouac, set up a campsite, change your loadout, call in a vehicle, and drive to your next sortie. Red Dead Redemption 2 is filled with divertissements like hunting and gambling; Breakpoint, at best, emulates an arcade’s shooting gallery.

The first few hours of Breakpoint are its boldest, as your underpowered and outgunned character’s chopper is shot down over the archipelago of Auroa. There are immediate personal stakes, given that the mission appears to have been betrayed by a former ally, Lt. Col. Cole D. Walker (Jon Bernthal). There’s also a real element of danger in the arrival of Walker’s elite Wolves, whose high gear levels make this one of the rare times in the game which a stealthy retreat is recommended, and where you’ll want to drop to the ground and use stealth camo to hide from the tracking Azrael drones that occasionally fly overhead. After appropriating a vehicle, Nomad can use visual clues to reach the friendly base of Erewhon, where many of the locals hid following the private military coup that led to the techtopia of Auroa being cut off from the outside world (and your team being sent in to investigate).

But the nonlinear structure that follows from this point ensures that nothing is able to change from that point, either in story or core gameplay. The only character with a lick of development is Walker, who gets scene-chewing flashbacks meant to justify his hatred for a corruptible U.S. military. Defensive Mads Shulz and terrorist Haruhi Ito, the respective leaders of the island’s two resistance factions, exist almost entirely to dispense daily missions. And while one mission might take place in a coastal villa designed to attract elite investors while another might be set in an underground Cold War bunker retrofitted as a data-processing center, you’ll use the same tools to clear them. Progression can be oddly wonky as well. For one, you might find yourself being asked to return a citizen from an overrun camp, even if you just cleared it out minutes ago. And if you die, there’s no telling where you’ll reload, as it could be hundreds of meters away, or directly in a guard’s sights.

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Breakpoint’s fixed nature is at direct odds with its open-world design, and ultimately results in a game that less about realism than it is about imposing limits. Only certain guards can call for reinforcements, and enemies that are “on alert” will continue to march directly toward the sound of gunfire, even if that means thoughtlessly climbing over the corpses of their predecessors, directly into a kill corridor. Worse, the game expects players to act as inorganically as the AI. The only way past a chainlink fence is with a craftable laser cutter, the final battle must be fought at close range, and should you dare to kill the sniper Rosebud from a distance, you’ll inexplicably fail on account of being too far from your objective. There’s no emergent gameplay here, there’s just a rigid set of often unseen rules, and while there are plenty of military engagements in Breakpoint, none of them are particularly engaging.

The game was reviewed using a review code provided by Ubisoft.

Score: 
 Developer: Ubisoft  Publisher: Ubisoft  Platform: PlayStation 4  Release Date: October 4, 2019  ESRB: M  ESRB Descriptions: Blood, Intense Violence, Mild Sexual Themes, Strong Language  Buy: Game

Aaron Riccio

Aaron has been playing games since the late ’80s and writing about them since the early ’00s. He also obsessively writes about crossword clues at The Crossword Scholar.

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