Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Breakpoint

Ghost Recon Breakpoint is coincidentally living up to its name, being a failure and potential gravedigger for the famous franchise. Riddled with Pay-to-Win microtransactions tacked on looter shooter gameplay and pretty under average storytelling, even Jon Berenthal wasn’t enough to arise this gameplay up to some decent playable heights.

Ghost Recon: Breakpoint is a bland, boring experience that brings nothing new to the table and goes as far as to make the franchise stray further away from what made it unique years ago, a ghost of its former self.

One of the worst open worlds Ubisoft has released. Even if its issues have been patched by the time you read this, this is one seriously uninspired sandbox. [Issue#168, p.88]

Ghost Recon Breakpoint may have solid shooting and co-op play foundations, but it can't make up for the aggressive microstransactions, infuriating technical issues and mission structures so repetitive they soon become tedious to complete. After attempting to cherry pick popular features from other games, Breakpoint ends up feeling like a chaotic yet bland mess that really isn't worthy of your time.

It would make sense if the addition of loot were in service of guiding people to spend real money on better guns, but even then the stats are so meaningless it would take a lot of convincing. There's some surprising fun to be had stealthily infiltrating enemy compounds and playing with friends, but Breakpoint is still a generic and distinctly sub-par game. It's essentially every Ubisoft open-world game rolled into one, failing to excel in any one area or establish its own identity. Breakpoint is a messy, confused game and a ghost of the series' former self.

There’s nothing wrong with a game making you work hard before it yields rewards, but Ghost Recon Breakpoint takes that principle so far that, in its early stages at least, playing it is a chore. The latest iteration of Ubisoft’s future-soldier open-world shooter has plenty of good points, but those are marred by basic elements that so broken that the game feels like a backward step from Ghost Recon: Wildlands (2017).

Ghost Recon Breakpoint should be the breaking point for Ubisoft's open world design by committee. There's an entertaining experience buried somewhere under the bloat and I had some fun at times in the game – I love infiltrating bases, but everything surrounding that is a pain. Maybe, just maybe, not every game needs to be open world? Maybe not every game needs a gear score? Sometimes simplicity is key.

Ghost Recon Breakpoint is a messy game that half-heartedly tries to do too many things, resulting in a game that lacks a firm identity as to what it wants to be.

In stark comparison to previous Ghost Recon iteration Wildlands, Breakpoint feels as though it has no real sense of what it’s supposed to be or what players want from it.

In the end, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint is just a mess. Between its technical issues, repetitive gameplay, subpar gear system, and sinister microtransactions; this is probably the worst open-world live service game so far. Hopefully, its technical issues will be patched soon but the base game will still remain one of the most soulless experiences that I've played this console generation.

Breakpoint’s fixed nature is at direct odds with its open-world design, and ultimately results in a game that less about realism than it is about imposing limits.

As a longtime fan of the series and as someone that honestly tried to give this a shot, I'm sorry to say that Breakpoint is a failure. I suppose the game can only get better from here, but it is not currently in a shape to even be considered finished.