I finished Breakpoint

 Guess I'm a liar

 

Yeah, I know what I said and what, at the time, I meant about the way that Ghost Recon Breakpoint made me feel- largely hopeless for the state of our society, and so I thought myself unable to continue and finish the convent that I had begun. Afterall that's no great anomaly, is it? People start games all the time that they get bored of and never finish? In fact, that's a normal way to react to a mediocre game. Hear me? It's totally 100% NORMAL! But damn it, why can't I just leave it like that? Why can't I just accept 'bad game is bad' and move on with my life? It is perhaps because... I bought the ultimate edition (albeit on steep discount) and wanted to get the most out of the money that I spent because I'm a penny squeezer like that? If I spend 20 quid on a game I will get 20 pounds worth of enjoyment even if I have to carve it out of the game's flesh to get there! That is my vow and shakeable promise!

So I came back to the game and after a week of spread out play sessions I've finally wrapped up my time with Breakpoint and I can say first of all... wow, that was so much more plateable than Assassin's Creed Odyssey! I don't know how utterly brain-broken you have to become to defend the 'integrity' of Assassin Creed's 'RPG age', but the developers over at Ghost Recon had their heads on straight enough to realise how pathetically unsuited such a system was for their stealth tactical action franchise and so just gave us the ability to turn all that right off. Doing so blocked me out of engaging in the Raids, sure- but I don't really care about 'Raids' who's only difficulty is a boring robot boss enemy. If they couldn't think of anything better than a giant robot challenge dungeon- why should I bother?

Trying to play Breakpoint as an open world adventure stealth game more in the vein of Wildlands made it much easier to get into the rhythm of base infiltration, steady execution and speedy exfil. It's a winning formula that doesn't require a lot of creative design to keep feeling somewhat fun- just the basic framework of this kind of game needs to exist and people can create the scenarios for themselves. Giving the game a chance left me with only the main story to contend with... which was pretty terrible to be honest. Whereas Wildlands presented something of a freeform approach to how you took back the county, Breakpoint strings you along tedious storylines following side characters you never come to care about or chasing side bosses you're never properly introduced to and so don't care about. These mission threads are unimaginative and typically involve extracting information from base to base, hacking some terminal or... umm... actually that's pretty much it until the 'set piece' chain finale missions which are so lame I can't even remember any of them. And of course the main story ends in a horrendously out-of-style boss fight which show cased the worst of Ubisoft's desire to be a 'stereotypical action adventure game'. They literally made the final bad guy bullet proof until you destroy his ring of drones- it just sucks.

What I hadn't realised when I started was that the various content packs that needed to be brought actually contained the second and third acts in Breakpoint's amazingly repetitive storyline- so that's a great way to hook unsuspecting consumers into your web, now isn't it? The Sam Fisher campaign is meant to be a direct continuation, albeit offering slightly more interesting stealth-based mission types wherein the player is encouraged, and sometimes forced, not to just get bored and shoot the place up to get things over quicker. The final boss of that act also wasn't quite as painful. And the final act... which I'm somewhat struggling to remember... oh right, the prototypical 'Russians' questline that every American military story has to have... that one was okay. It really just felt like an excuse to justify the last corners of the overly giant map which hadn't yet been utilised, because Breakpoint clearly struggles under the weight of an unnecessarily gigantically barren world. 

In reality, the only point where Breakpoint really came into it's own was after the main story and it's DLCs and it's seasonal events were good and buried. After the game failed to reach the heights of success that the team wanted, and Ubisoft decided to murder the game's potential by making it ground zero for their pathetically ill-fated 'Ubisoft Quartz' NFT scheme, the team were left with something of a freeing opportunity to reshuffle the entire game into something better fitting the world they had built. Maybe it was a last ditch attempt to prove the worth of the game, now that shareholder expectations had given up on them entirely, and I think that 'Operation Motherland' actually does a wonderful job reinvigorating what Ghost Recon should have always been about.

Creating a Conquest game mode, Motherland splits the impossible Archipelago up into districts and regions beset by different lieutenants led by a mastermind you have to uncover gradually by working your way up the chain. But the way you uncover these lieutenants is by taking over their territory through take-over activity missions such as destroying key vehicles in an important area, rescuing hostages, assassinating leaders or just wiping out an entire outpost. These aren't really presented as missions but rather free-form world objectives that whittle down the security of an area until time comes to knock the whole place out of control through a slightly more ambitious take-over mission. And what's more- there's actually tactical planning involved here! 

Just like I whined about it's absence in the main game, in conquest mode the targets you choose to take out actually have an effect on the world! Take out a drone production facility and you can remove the swarms of drone preventing you from taking to the skies, destroy a helicopter depot and you limit the amount of the air reinforcements the region sees. You get to choose which targets you take down and bask in the way that each makes your job easier as you turn the island against it's invaders- it's actually very well planned out and executed! The narrative actually feels a bit more interesting too, focusing more on mystery and investigation than blown-out melodrama. I mean sure, the mystery is blindly obvious, but at least the team tried.

Honestly, Operation Motherland should have been the main game of Breakpoint and we could have spent the preceding years building off from that solid foundation, rather than languishing around with cope dealing with a mediocre backbone. And to think I had to push through the entire rest of the game to get here! How many players never stuck around long enough to see this game at it's best? It's just a shame how backward decisions made by clueless 'innovation executives' managed to disgrace Breakpoint in it's growing years and possibly killed this little sub franchise off on it's own. Had this been the entire original game, I may have raised by score my a point or two to be honest! As it is, however, Breakpoint is an average game which doesn't quite capture the bottled lightning of Wildlands and probably doesn't have enough life imbued in it to warrant a third go around anyway. Just another Ubisoft franchise dragged too far...