Ghost Recon Breakpoint Impressions: Needs more polishing
We recently checked out Ghost Recon Breakpoint closed beta.
Ghost Recon Breakpoint is published by Ubisoft.
Ghost Recon Breakpoint just had a closed beta that ran over the weekend, offering players a sneak peek at two of the story’s main missions, a bunch of sidequests and a large portion of the map. This game is intent on being realistic, gritty, and above all else tactical. Sometimes, that actually works out and you get really intense enemy encounters in a hostile open world. Unfortunately, it’s just not enough to make up for all of the game’s problems so far.
The island of Auroa
Even the small segment of Auroa available in the beta was pretty huge!
Welcome to the island of Auroa, where tourists are heavily frowned upon. Skell Technology operates on this island as a military contractor, but has recently fallen under suspicion of engineering an assassination. Nomad and his Ghost Recon team head to Auroa to investigate the island only to find out that an old buddy and his new army have taken over the island.
This old buddy is former Ghost Cole D. Walker, whom fans might remember from the Operation Oracle update in Ghost Recon Wildlands earlier this year. You might also remember him better during his tours shooting down zombies or wearing a white skull on his chest - as Cole is played by The Punisher himself, Jon Bernthal.
The secret origins of The Punisher.
Auroa is a fairly by-the-numbers open world. Cole’s army of Wolves are everywhere on the island, having taken over Skell Technology drone production for their own gain. Even if you don’t encounter them, the Wolves’ many drones flying around the island are always a danger. Being discovered and hunted down by one is by far my favourite experience from the beta - it’s incredibly intense.
Exploration is pretty great in this game. There’s a guided mode which gives players an ever-present objective marker if you really want some sense of direction. However, you can turn that off and rely on reading maps to find your way around Auroa and reach an objective. This really lends itself well to the ‘tactical’ experience Breakpoint is going for.
This game has issues
Chests can be found everywhere in Auroa. Open them up for goodies like weapons and useful attachments!
Now we enter the bad bits of the beta. Keep in mind that this might have been an older build of the game though, and thus we might not see all these issues in its full release. Unfortunately, it comes out in under a month, so…
First off, this game has a frankly enormous amount of graphical bugs and glitches. I played the game on PlayStation 4, and I was actively horrified at what I was seeing. It’s nowhere near as bad as the constant T-posing of Fallout 76’s beta, sure, but good grief. I experienced all sorts of graphical issues, from framerate drops and textures not loading in, to pixelated lighting and NPCs literally floating down from on high.
You can find civilians and interact with them in homesteads. Those rain effects though, yikes.
Certain character animations look appallingly bad. Because the game’s trying to be realistic, characters have different animations when running or walking through water, leading to some pretty hilarious character movements. Running animations make characters look like they’re sprinting with a giant stick up their butt - not to be crude, but it’s honestly the best description I can give for it. It really kills player immersion when you see cheap animations like these all the time.
This screenshot has it all. An ugly HUD and a floating NPC!
The HUD is pretty obstructive too. When turned on, there’s far too much going on at the same time. Imagine turning on subtitles and they took up half your screen - it's the same here. You also navigate through menus with a cursor, which is just the worst way to do menus on a console game.
All these aren’t just problems you encounter every once in a while in-game. If they’re present at release, you will have to deal with them every time you play the game - be it sprinting or navigating a menu.
Gear and skill trees
Breakpoint's character classes.
Ghost Recon Breakpoint allows you to select from four different player classes; Assault, Sharpshooter, Panther and Field Medic. Each of these classes come with their own specific bonuses and you can switch between them on the fly. The skill tree is also great, with really deep upgrades and perks that you can unlock with points gained every time you level up.
If this game’s starting to sound like an RPG - it doesn’t end there. Like a ton of other games coming out recently, Breakpoint adopts a gear system. This means that every clothing item and weapon you pick up possess different gear levels and you’ll have to constantly switch them out for something more powerful. Ubisoft is clearly homogenising all their games again here (remember Ubisoft towers?), as this is practically the same gear system as games like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and The Division 2.
Now, all your gear comes with stats - similar to The Division 2.
It feels really out of place in a tactical shooter of all things, when one vest increases your ‘power level’ by 10 and whatnot. What’s worse is Ubisoft’s reason for incorporating it: players in Ghost Recon Wildlands stuck to the same weapons too much, so Ubisoft wanted them to constantly try new weapons this time around.
Conclusion
Like with all multiplayer games - it's more fun with friends!
As much as it seems like I’m just complaining about it endlessly, I did enjoy certain segments of my time with Breakpoint. I enjoyed going around and finding clues for investigations, and I thought the gunplay and customisation system were really great. Unfortunately, everything good in this beta was vastly overshadowed by everything bad in it. We can only hope all of it gets fixed by its release date on October 4, 2019.
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