Knowing when you're beaten
My process for writing reviews on games is typical all consuming. I like to sit down and voraciously rip my way through a gameplay experience as exhaustively as possible. Typically you'll find me in the trenches, playing every game until it's final moment, taking notes about every step of the way to accurate convey it's entire package. That's typically the respect I impart upon games because they are collaborative works of art that deserve to be consumed as a whole product, rather than in parts. I eat up the story, learn what makes the characters kick, feel how the gameplay lays itself out and how far it spreads across the length of the game, and convey my own knowledge having experienced the world of games for as long as I have. But judging from the title of this blog alone you can probably tell that is a streak I am about to break, and I have some prime cut excuses to explain myself.
Let me start by talking about Ghost Recon: Wildlands. I started playing Wildlands a few years after it launched and subsequently faded from history as just another open world Ubisoft game with nothing revolutionary under it's name, and so my expectations were for a simple time-waster bargain bin experience. What I actually ended up playing surprised me with it's quality. Revolutionary? No. But solid and repayable: Yes! It was a vast open world built around tiny simply designed stealth-focused gameplay snippets splayed over the wide land of Bolivia. Sure, the world was more impressive for it's scale than the usual ascendant beauty of a Ubisoft product, and the gameplay was so easy that 'stealth' was pretty much always a choice rather than a requirement- but the game was easy to pick and get lost in, the story was simple and formulaic so you could follow along without really getting invested, (the game wasn't in-depth enough to get invested anyway) and it's fun was just intuitive to a fault.
Over my time playing Ghost Recon Wildlands, covering my two playthroughs, DLC, Online meddling and half of a third 'hardcore' playthrough I was trying out before I got bored- I sank a total of 18 Days, 17 hours and 40 minutes into my time with that game. Let that alone be my glowing endorsement of an average experience that got everything it needed to right to keep the player coming back, no doubt aided by the very light live-service skin that the game wore. I would never call Wildlands a great game, but I would go to bat for establishing it as a good one. Better than the critics who discarded it, a military-themed playground with mindless fun and decent stealth- moderate engagement and a serviceable narrative. The DLC was kind of bad though. So that was what I was expecting with Breakpoint.
Actually, I wanted Breakpoint to be a vast improvement on everything that Wildlands was, as you may have picked up from my glowing endorsement of the game's beta, but early reviews quickly dispelled that fantasy. Again, critics didn't like it, fans were lukewarm on it, and in typical Ubisoft fashion the team took that as code for "Make the game package as expensive as possible and keep throwing new price-inflating content on top!" (I guess it works for them, somehow.) But I figured at worst the game would just be another Wildlands- an average time-sink worthy of keeping around for a year or two just to waste time in when there's nothing else to do. Maybe some half-decent stealth, a decent enough story, some replayability- it should have at least hit the minimum bar that it's predecessor set, right? RIGHT?
I can't rightly identify what went wrong with this game without a time machine and a news crew. but let me try and quantify why I'm actually going to give up on playing this game with just over 15 hours of laborious playtime. (And it's not entirely the game's fault. To be fair.) And to start with I need to harp on one of the most important parts of any interactive product: the gameplay. Look how they massacred my boy! Wildlands was basic and intuitive in that way that all average games tend to be, universal and easy to pick up, friendly to casual play. Philosophies that the Breakpoint team evidently spat on. I can't believe I never realised at the time just how damaging to the gameplay cycle the haphazard and badly conceived survival elements would be.
The key feature of Breakpoint that set it apart from Wildlands was the idea that 'you are all there is, no back-up, no overwatch, just you on your own'. That meant scavenging for weaponry, picking up crafting materials and looking after yourself when your body gets shot to pieces after a fire fight. The game has a stamina meter which becomes damaged if you push it past it's limit, an injury system that requires you to sit down and expend bandages if you've been wounded or else be forced to limp around slowly, and you have no companions. (At least at first. The game added AI companions later in a really lazy way that doesn't give them any ambient chatter or personality or cutscene presence or any of the little touches that made them anything more than shoot-turrets in Wildlands.)
The problem with all of these systems is how much of a hassle they are to the casual loop of this giant game clearly not built to be a hardcore survival experience. Simply sprinting from one objective to another in this ungainly huge map will damage your stamina requiring you to expend a water bottle that needs to crafted or purchased to be replaced. Injuries are saved with checkpoints, meaning the only way to recover after every gunfight even if you catch a stray bullet is to expend a bandage which needs to be crafted or purchased, or to retreat to a camp and endure an ardours and unskippable 'patching yourself up' animation. Do you want to take a break from your routine of base infiltration to go plant picking so you can craft bandages? No? Then maybe you don't mind fast travelling back to the one vendor location in the whole game, walking the two minute journey to the vendor, and then walking back out and fast travelling back into the action? What's that? Oh right, that sounds tedious and unfun. Funny that!
UI has been a big joke at Ubisoft's expense ever since Elden Ring reminded the industry how it was done by being so beautifully sparse and easy to innately grasp. Breakpoint is prime example of it at the company's worst. 3 different Quests pinned under one another with a map squeezed in one corner and class progression reminder shoved in another menu. The quest menu is an ugly mess of faction quests and main quests and DLC quests and online quests all smashed together on the world's least coherent evidence board. Even getting and using weapons is inherently complicated. Picking them up doesn't unlock them, you need to buy the blueprint then gather the parts and build the thing. Then, of course, the crappy gun is levelled: although thankfully that entire painful levelling aspect of the game is now opt-in only thanks to a year of sustained backlash forcing the developers to change course. You still have to go through the stupid 'blueprint buying' process though.
Whenever you start a game and dread the process of learning what all your menus mean, that should be a ringing red alert right there that this is a game that needs to be redesigned from the ground-up. Strip out the pages of information, declutter the player's interface, order the quest screen like a sane person would- make the act of understanding the menus as painless as possible and you'll retain players past that initial introductory hour. I mean for god sake: the game had an entire 5 quest long chain of just menu and systems tutorials, read the room Breakpoint, you're not the kind of game that demands that level of consumer focus!
The world of Ghost Recon: Breakpoint is an archipelago of fictional islands with some of the most confusing geometry known to man. And whilst yes, on a very surface level the world of the game is pretty, the mountains are vast and snow-capped, the forests are bounding and heavy and the swamps are... swampy: there's a huge lack of heart and identity in any of it. Culture, personality- it's all burned away to fit this new-age aesthetic of sleek modern habitats built in largely non-descript island scenery. You'll find clean-tiled research stations and clean-tiled city scapes and maybe a little bit of a rougher-hewn military base and if you're really lucky, you might even happen across an old air-hanger or two. But even the derelicts don't appear to have any artistic impression or story to tell- they're just placed there to be there. This is perhaps one of the most artificial feeling worlds that Ubisoft has ever produced and really dulls that desire to explore and see what's out there when you know it's all designed to just be content pockets- there's nothing to really see.
And the world is big, in all the worst 'Ubisoftian' ways. Habitats, stations and bases are all spread out miles from each for no apparent reason whatsoever. Drone manufacturing hubs are slapped in the middle of nowhere, habitats are established with no connection to surrounding resources and all of it creates a world of 'scale' and nothing else. But this game in particular seems to be too big even for Ubisoft's usual 'flood the world with activities and call it a day' approach. You'll spend hours just travelling between content locations across mountains or down endless identical roads, beset with nothing but your own unending boredom as it becomes ever more apparent that there's nothing to actually do inbetween base infiltrations. Tiny patrols of enemies, the odd fly-over sky drone, flowers to pick, and walking. So much bloody walking. And when you finally take to the skies, you'll find the beauty of the world slightly tainted by the cloudy mess of signal fire campsites (the game's only fast travel points) because Ubisoft for some reason felt it necessary to make all these points visible at the same time for the naked eye, despite the fact they appear just fine and dandy on the in-game map. This game kind of feels like it was made in separate rooms with no interaction with one another.
In story Breakpoint starts somewhat strong, for the first few minutes. You are attacked on a routine check-up to the research-facility-gone-dark by a team of rogue special forces members led by Jon Bernthal that have seized control of the islands military potential and plan to... well, you see, they're going to... um... I guess actually they're still in the process of seizing, somehow. Despite the fact that these guys are the only security the island has aside from standard mercenaries who... I don't think it's ever really explained who hired the standard mercenaries but they seem to be buddy buddy with the Special Forces guys so I guess they're the same team: Jon's 'Wolves' haven't immediately seized control of the various murderous military drones and waged international world war or whatever half-assed 24-style fanfic the writer of this mess wrote on the back of his napkin the moment after he was hired before running off to get a more fulfilling role doing literally anything else.
The narrative is paper-thin and the game realises this immediately, stringing the player slong in an incessantly boring line of 'please fetch this person or this technology or this McGuffin' quests under the loose promise that it's all conjoined in a wider plot that seems ephemeral at this point. The only solid is the fact that Jon, the villain, has a connection with the protagonist's, Nomad's, past in that they both served in some middle-eastern war together. (It's probably specified which one at some point but it isn't really all that important anyway) Rather than leave this to the imagination or allude to their brotherly bond, Ubisoft will rip you away at genuinely random moments to subject you to minute long flash-back sequences of their daily antics together, frolicking around warzones hand-in-hand, to the extent that they lose their narrative oomph almost immediately. And the 'triggers' for these flashbacks are so asinine. One scientist mentions how Walker (that's Jon's character name but he's so generic I usually just call him Jon anyway) is working with some cutthroat lady, so cue a 5 minute flashback of interactions with Walker being about as sus of a soldier as humanly possible (torturing information out of prisoners with two swift stick hits to the shin. The guy works fast) and he'll off-hand mention wanting to work with a woman like that someday. Meaning we've learnt what? That the woman we were just told Walker is working with fits the description of a woman that Walker said he knew a few years ago? Wow, am I glad we got that piece of vital connecting tissue to make this narrative function! And here I was about to enter a boredom induced coma- think of the narrative complexity I would have been missing out on!
Progression feels non existent throughout this game, and I acknowledge that my own style of play is slightly to blame for that. Forgoing the asinine and painful weapon levelling and upgrade system in favour of playing this like an actual tactical stealth game apparently came at the cost of any feeling of gameplay progress whatsoever. What in previous Ghost Recon games was reinforced by coherent progress through a narrative, Wildlands even had an extremely comprehensive board of targets we worked our way up to reach the big boss, has been buried in favour of faction questlines that feel like they were written and acted by an AI that was trained on the work of other, somehow depressed, AI language models. Missions don't feel like they've progressed the narrative at all, they just kind of stop and a new one starts- and I get the feeling I could play this game all the way through and never get a sense for if I was at the beginning, middle or end of the narrative. Which in a way is impressive in itself. They've broken all tenets of solid pacing and storytelling to break new ground in generic game design, truly Ubisoft are in a league of their own.
And I have to talk about the cutscenes for a second. The only way that Breakpoint has to convey information to the player, outside of a hideously cluttered menu system packed with some of the most mind-numbingly boring lore files ever written, (And remember: I'm a guy who reads all the in-universe Fantasy books in game- I know the difference between engaging and boring lore text.) are cutscenes at the beginning, middle and end of every mission. So why did no effort go into them? Cutscene models appear to be the exact same as in-play models, with the lack of ambulatory and moving face muscles being very apparent. Model choreography is actually non-existent, characters will stand in front of each other and speak directly into each others faces with no other sign of life, yet for some reason Ubisoft thought this developed enough to justify constant shot, reverse-shot angles so we can see the lifeless conversations in all their (sometimes unskippable) glory. Oh, and the actual animated cutscenes appear to only be the flashbacks and a few extremely rare set-pieces that are largely unimpressive or drag out for way too long. (The scene of Nomad fighting off the drones set on him made me actually want to curl up and go to sleep until the game was done playing itself.)
There's more to Breakpoint, there's an online I can't bring myself to play for more than an hour a week, several islands I don't care enough to explore, and two expansions I'll never push through to reach-but what's the point? I experienced everything in the first 5 hours and the game has no new tricks to show me. I get the same kind of feeling playing Breakpoint that I did when playing Watch_Dogs Legion, that sickening tightening of the stomach when reality dawns after less than a tenth of this experience that "Oh, this is it. They ran out of ideas instantly, didn't they?" Ubisoft always gets a harsh wrap for it's bloated games, stuffed with meaningless stuff to pad out playtime, but then you get games like this: the bottom of even that low-rent barrel. AA ideas for small games stretched out and stamped into full fledged AAA length products that can't justify that size or length, bore their customers to tears and makes us wonder why we even waste time playing video games to begin with. Breakpoint isn't a video game, it's a chore- and I just don't think I can bring myself to finish a chore of a game to play. Maybe I'll inch my way through bit by bit, but it won't be to write this review, but to burn time in the most vapid way possible. There's no point in formulating a review, I've experienced everything this game is going to deliver to me already. As you can tell I absolutely do not recommend this game, even at the steepest discount. In heart, this is actually a better play experience that Legion, but I'm so disappointed in it's lack of ambition that I can't even rate this game as comparable to that. Ghost Recon: Breakpoint gets a D - grade in my review score. What little credit present is due only to the functioning game mechanics that can be fun initially, but it doesn't carry the game and doesn't carry the score to anything close to passing grade. What a sad excuse for a Ghost Recon game. Ubisoft underwhelms once again.
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