Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon® Wildlands

My first honest warning about Ghost Recon Wildlands is also its highest compliment: load this up with three friends and you will lose entire evenings without noticing. The game launched in March 2017 and Ubisoft Paris built it from the ground up as a four-player online co-op experience, and that foundational decision shapes every single thing about how it plays. Drone a base from the ridge, mark cartel soldiers, call a sync shot, have someone barrel in with a stolen truck anyway and blow the whole plan up. That cycle of methodical planning dissolving into glorious chaos is the actual product being sold here. Mechanically, you are running a Ghost special forces team through a fictionalized Bolivia overrun by the Santa Blanca drug cartel. The mission loop is straightforward: push into a new province, gather intel on low-ranking cartel lieutenants called Buchons, work your way up the hierarchy toward El Sueno at the top. Your main tools are a remote-controlled drone for scouting and marking enemies, binoculars for tagging at range, and a sync shot command that lets your squad drop up to four tagged targets simultaneously without raising an alarm. There is a skill tree split across five categories covering weapons, drone, items, physical, and squad upgrades. None of it is complicated, which is a feature, not a flaw. The gunsmith system lets you modify assault rifles, SMGs, shotguns, sniper rifles, and sidearms with parts found or looted in the world, swapping optics, suppressors, underbarrels, and more. Gear and character customization go deep enough that four co-op players rarely look alike. Here is where the honest part comes in. Solo, this game is noticeably less fun. The AI squadmates respond to a basic command wheel for go-to, fire, and regroup orders, and a separate rebel support wheel lets you call in vehicles, diversions, or mortar fire. But the AI teammates are largely decorative in firefights and the story, a narco-state destabilization yarn, is not going to win any writing awards. The open world structure is Ubisoft formula at its most pure: clear camps, collect resource tokens for upgrades, repeat across 21 provinces. Repetition sets in well before the credits. The driving physics draw consistent complaints across reviews, with wonky handling on Bolivia's hilly terrain making ground vehicles feel unreliable. Helicopters, thankfully, are everywhere in the world and basically fix the traversal problem the moment you find one. The co-op side of the equation is a different story. Up to four players can jump into a session online, progress carries back to each player's own campaign, and friends can join or leave at any point without interrupting the host's game. There is no split-screen or couch co-op on PC, which matters if you were hoping for a sofa setup. The PvP Ghost War mode exists but public matchmaking for it has been essentially dead for years, so treat this purely as a co-op PvE game. Invite-based co-op with friends still functions. If you have two or three people who actually want to coordinate, even loosely, Wildlands delivers exactly the kind of large-scale sandbox chaos that turns a Thursday night into a 2am session. The bottom line from where I sit: solo players will hit a wall of repetition somewhere around the midpoint and never fully shake it. But if you have a squad, even just one other person, this is one of the better open-world co-op shooters of its era, and the sheer size and visual variety of Bolivia gives you plenty of playground to work through before fatigue kicks in.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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