Ghost Recon - Future Soldier

It's been a good five years since I stepped onto the battlefield with a full-fledged "Ghost Recon" game, cruising through the skies with "Advanced Warfighter 2." Since that time, Ubisoft's been putting the finishing touches on its latest chapter, "Future Soldier," only to run into delays and forcing its release date to move a few months. Well, the time for delays is over, as the finished product has finally worked its way to store shelves. Now the question is, has this long wait been worth it?

In "Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier," you start out as part of a unit running an infiltration on a weapons rig. However, after taking down all the responsible parties, the team is wiped out by a sudden bomb explosion. From there, the perspective changes over to another team, the Ghosts, are out to find who's responsible for the explosion. It's not the most original plot line in the world, but it sets the pace for what lies ahead.

The action jumps all over the place in "Ghost Recon: Future Soldier." One minute you're on a full infiltration mission, shooting enemies as a team. The next, you're sneaking around with "Predator"-like camo, ensuring that bad guys don't get riled up or sound off an alarm that would bring their friends into the battle. Other sequences are thrown in, too, including ones that put you behind the wheel of a turret (not quite the "Ghost Recon" formula, but we'll forgive it) and great little sequences where you let a well-armed drone do all the dirty work.

Though the scope of it shifts quite a bit, "Future Soldier" never lets up on its tactical action. The gameplay is engaging and thorough, and even gives you the option to shoot enemies through a third-person zoom or a first-person ironsight, however you choose. You also have access to a number of high-tech goods, including tech grenades that can read enemy positions, so you can prep your team accordingly.

In addition, working with your team never feels like a drag, thanks to finely tuned AI and a tag feature that lets you take out squads together, so no one "gets away". You can go at it solo, or have your friends join in for some entertaining co-op, with up to four players partaking in a team. If you need practice working together as a cohesive unit, you can also play in Guerrilla mode, a Horde-like mode where you cap waves of enemies before they get you. Hardly original, but it's fun.

If you're ready to get competitive, "Future Soldier" also introduces a wild multiplayer setup, where you can take on players through a number of modes. I like the look of Conflict personally, mainly because it would seem objectives keep moving around, forcing you to scramble as you get into firefights and try to reach them in a timely manner.

Where "Ghost Recon: Future Soldier" comes up a little short is with the presentation. The graphics aren't horrible by any means, but there are times they look a little unfinished, with some fuzziness in the environments or some of the worst looking civilians I've ever stumbled across. The animations are good otherwise, and the future effects really light up the screen. Likewise, the dialogue between your troops is good, and they give fair indication where your next targets lie, or when someone needs help. The music is all right too, when it kicks up during more tense situations.

Though some may feel that the nature of "Future Soldier" isn't fully based on the "Ghost Recon" legacy - and the graphics aren't as sharp as, say, "Battlefield 3" - there's no doubt it's still a full-fledged war machine. The gameplay holds up significantly, and the multiplayer, both co-op and versus, offer hours of replay value. This is one Future worth going back to.





--Kyle