"Ghost Recon Future Soldier review"

Ghost Recon Future Soldier is out for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 from Friday May 25. The PC version will release on June 15.

Despite its concessions to the Call of Duty action crowd, Ghost Recon Future Soldier is a terrific update of Tom Clancy's tactical shooter.

Formats: Xbox 360 (tested), PlayStation 3, PC
Developer: Ubisoft
Publisher: Ubisoft
Released: 25 May 2012

The Ghost Recon series has long been known for prioritising tactics over gunplay, though the precise definition of tactics has been gradually easing up in the 11 years since the first game. Ghost Recon (2001) was a work of nerve-shredding tension that saw you ushering your squad of well-armed killers individually through underbrush, forest and desert, knowing all the while that a single bullet would be their destruction. A premise so mercilessly hardcore and so focused on patience and stealth was never going to survive into the mass market of the modern gaming age, though it's still a surprise to find that the latest instalment of the series has dropped even squad command from the single-player game. What's even more surprising is how well such a bottom-up rethink works.

The new game gives you control of one of four members of a tough-voiced wetworks squad, taciturn chaps who creep about on the edges of global flashpoints snapping necks and sniping goons with sinister businesslike élan. The Ghosts are assisted by a raft of five-minutes-from-now military technology, including optical camouflage that makes you mostly invisible to enemies while sneaking, augmented-reality sunglasses that project target markers and objectives onto the environment, X-ray vision that lets you see through walls and a nifty Parrot drone that zooms around the battlefield, dropping through windows and doors before swinging down little wheels to trundle along happily at ankle height. For one mission you also find yourself backing up the Warhound, a vast walking weapons platform, clearly based on Boston Dynamics' bloodcurdling BigDog robot, that spews forth mortars and guided missiles at a twitch of the trigger.

With all this tech on the Ghosts' side, you almost feel sorry for the hapless mercs and militiamen ranged against them, and for most of the game you'd be right. There's a meaty campaign, set across a scenic variety of world destinations -- a refugee camp in Zambia, an oil refinery in the Niger Delta, a drilling platform in the Barents Sea, the streets of downtown Peshawar and Moscow -- but if you're familiar with the sneak-and-shoot mechanics in games such as Splinter Cell, Rainbow Six Vegas or the latest Deus Ex, you'll only feel in serious danger when things go south and people start shooting back. Ubisoft's creditable decision not to turn your character into a bullet sponge pays dividends with the sense of peril in these segments: take more than a few bullets and your character is down and howling for a medic, while after three revivals your Ghost gives up the ghost. Further neat mechanics such as suppressing fire -- your camera shakes and wobbles while under heavy fire behind cover, making it more difficult to pop out and line up shots -- add to the drama, to the extent that you'll find yourself really keen to avoid open confrontation if at all possible.

The stealth in Future Soldier takes inspiration from several mechanics in the last Splinter Cell game, in particular the mark-and-execute function. Tagging targets with the right shoulder button assigns them individually to members of your squad, and a marker lights up to show when your men are in position to take their shot. Instigating combat then triggers a brief sequence of slow-motion that allows you to eliminate all four at once, a trick that becomes progressively more useful as the game progresses. You'll find yourself spinning up the team's miniature drone to sail above the battlefield and tag rooftop snipers or unwary outliers, then collapsing them with silenced bursts of fire while their teammates potter obliviously about in the distance. Combined with the spookily efficient movement of your AI squad, this can at times make things too easy: you mark the targets, you press the button, they go down, you move on. Playing in online co-op with friends, however, the experience becomes altogether more tense, as you work your way to an optimum firing position under the gaze of patrolling guards. It'd be even more fun if Ubisoft had seen fit to include an offline splitscreen function for the campaign, an aspect present in previous Ghost Recon games that would have made this one really shine.

Getting both sneaking and combat right like this is quite an achievement, and the single player game, while you're in mission, feels for the most part solid and exciting. It's strongly reminiscent of several other games: the cover-based run-and-shoot action has the chunky solidity of Gears of War, the tactics nod to the SOCOM series, the stealth reminds of Deus Ex and Crysis 2, and there are more than a few homages to the Call of Duty series, the market Ubisoft must be desperately hoping to woo with this one, in everything from plot to level design.

As with many modern shooters, your role as part of a squad does let you in for a fair amount of bossing about from your squadmates -- for much of one level you are basically subservient to a large robotic dog -- and although the maps have much more width than the infamous scripted corridors of Call of Duty, with most having a network of alternate routes, the game occasionally pulls that series' nefarious trick of blacking you out and forcing you to return to the combat zone if you stray too far from the path. Still, for much of the campaign such tiny niggles fade into the background. The AI is solid, never throwing itself in your way or tripping enemy radars; the mechanics are decent; it all just feels right. If you enjoyed the famous All Ghillied Up sneaking level from the first Modern Warfare game, you will be in seventh heaven here for entire missions. Future Soldier may not have the nerve-shredding tension of the first game in the series, but what it does it does excellently.

There is a problem though -- the story. The story made me feel I was going senile, or that Tom Clancy was, or whichever half- demented work experience at Ubisoft Paris writes these things under his license. The developers of Future Soldier are clearly keen that you appreciate the routine nature of extreme combat situations for your squad, so the cutscenes between missions are for the most part resolutely downbeat. The Ghosts swap side-of-the-mouth banter in the aircraft-carrier canteen, or complain about not having time for a beer, while around them the world spins. Arriving back from a mission in the Barents Sea, they're told there's been a coup in Moscow; "Will we at least have time to eat something?" asks one of them uninterestedly. The disjuncture between this and the high-stakes missions is deliberately extreme: by the end you half-expect to see the Ghosts sidling out to the betting shop or creeping round Poundland between levels, just to drive the point home.

Future Soldier was developed by Ubisoft Paris for most of its chequered gestation period, and it's hard not to see the plot of the whole thing as a sort of sarcastic Gallic spin on the overwrought blockbusting of Call of Duty, with those games' breathless reversals of fortune and their endless shouty fearmongering about Russian nationalists, Russian separatists, Russian nationalist-separatists, Russian nationalist-separatist-tragical-comical-historical-pastoral ... Russians, anyway. But the developers' determination not to spoonfeed you the plot means that for much of the time the player risks not having a clue what's going on. It took me nearly half the game to work out that the 'Kojack' everyone was muttering about was the player character, a man called Kozak. Around that point, there's a brief attempt to give you the kind of personal investment in the action that the Call of Duty series attempted to such a ludicrous degree: the bad guys start saying things like 'I know all about you, Kojack," and telling your character that they know where he lives. Kojack doesn't seem worried, though, and with good reason, as these plot points don't raise their heads again for the remainder of the game. It feels as though someone left half the design document in a taxi, or that the game is setting itself up for the real story to strike in some mammoth DLC (perhaps not unlikely).

Things aren't helped by the dodgy cinematics, which bear a disturbing resemblance, in animation and detail, to the ones in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory seven years ago. Lipsync is off, the faces are strangely textureless as though drawn on balloons, and everyone's body seems to do that weird St Vitus's Dance associated with Nineties videogame exposition, in which pronouncing a sentence requires them to roll their torso earnestly back and forth while twitching their arms like a drunk in a strong wind. Towards the end of the game, voice tracks start to be recorded with no background ambient sound, textures go missing and so on: you'd forgive it in a fan mod, but here it just looks like carelessness, or worse, contempt. The developers clearly know that the missions are where the action is, and here they can't be bothered. That they're right doesn't make it any better. We might also draw a veil over the briefing screens, which look, charitably, as though they were assembled by a non-English-speaker transcribing a lecture he doesn't understand into PowerPoint. Bleeding chunks of text from the spoken briefing flash up on the screen, giving a surreal effect: BAD GUYS / LIVES OF OUR MEN / CONVENIENT HUB / DESTABALIZED (sic). There are very few of these moments in the actual missions; I did briefly wonder why a primary school in Nigeria is bedecked with murals proclaiming 'Primary School in Nigeria', but in general the immersion is well-worked-out.

Once the twelve-mission campaign ends, though, Ubisoft will be hoping that you turn your attention to the multiplayer, the one arena in which Ghost Recon really needs to compete with Infinity Ward's $7.2bn military behemoth. The online versus mode allows you to pick one of three classes, Rifleman (assault), Scout (stealth) and Engineer (support), each of which has its own advantages. Scouts have adaptive camouflage and sniper rifles, meaning that you will vanish if you stay still for more than a couple of seconds. Riflemen have speed and heavy assault weapons. Engineers can deploy drones. The various game modes prioritise teamwork, which can initially be quite a shock to those used to Call of Duty's individualist manshooting. In Conflict mode, teams must collaborate on a series of shifting objectives, working to capture resupply points or eliminate fleeing enemy agents. In Saboteur, you are tasked with retrieving a briefcase bomb and smuggling it into the empty base. Siege mode asks you to attack or defend a particular point on the map, and -- in a nod to the unforgiving nature of previous Ghost Recon multiplayer -- denies you a respawn if you're killed. There are no vehicles or destructible terrain, as with the Battlefield series: this is pure military tactics, command and control.

It's all good fun, though the need for teamwork is paramount. Bonuses are gained by supporting your teammates, and objectives fall faster if you're surrounded by members of your squad. But this kind of coherence seemed in rather short supply in pre-release matches. If you want to get the best from this game you have to play it right, which means putting together a team, turning on your microphone and playing it like a team game. Ubisoft are clearly aiming to instil more intelligence and strategy than their competitors require, but it leaves gamers without an extensive list of regular teammates in something of a bind, on multiplayer servers where getting people to turn on their microphones can itself be a difficulty. I'm not convinced the game gives you enough squad-communication tools to work collaboratively with someone who may not share the same language as you, but time will tell.

Played right, as a game between two communicative and experienced squads, this could be one of the most satisfying multiplayer experiences out there. The Gunsmith tool, heavily promoted by Ubisoft ahead of release, is in fact just a rather more complex spin on the weapon customisation tools in games like Rainbow Six Vegas, but it will allow dedicated multiplayer vultures to develop a boomstick tailored to their own particular playstyle. I'm not convinced that the Kinect integration is worth much -- yes, you can move the pretty guns around with your hands, but there is, for example, no integration of voice commands for your squad in-game -- but if you happen to have it, it's a fun gimmick.

Although there's no splitscreen in the campaign, there's a couch co-op mode called Guerrilla that asks players to defend a sequence of objectives from advancing waves of enemies. The spots you actually have to hold can be daft -- the dead centre of an office, surrounded on all sides by entrances and cover? -- but once the action hots up, fed by weapons drops between waves, it becomes a satisfying collaborative experience. There's a stealth round every few turns, too, allowing for an experience of the game's excellent sneaky gameplay in local co-op, though it remains a shame that it wasn't extended to the main story.

Is Future Soldier worth it? Yes, easily. There's a great deal of content here for the money, and a set of high-level weapon unlocks, combined with challenges to complete on every mission, should keep you coming back to the single-player or co-op games as to the online versus modes. Dismal story aside, this is a solid, professional, deeply enjoyable product. Like the Ghosts themselves, it's so good at what it does that you run the real risk of not noticing how superbly it's doing it.