Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon (PC)
Red Storm finally decides to go outside to play...and it's a rough world.
Red Storm exploded onto the computer gaming scene with Rainbow Six, which introduced unflinching realism to first-person shooters. Since then, they've been incrementally upgrading the same game. Even Rogue Spear, the most dramatic update, had the same essential gameplay. At long last, Ghost Recon represents their first effort to break completely free of the conventions of Rainbow Six, taking the action from close quarters battles into the realm of long-range modern infantry warfare.
Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon
Game Type: Tactical Shooter
Developer: Red Storm Entertainment
Publisher: Ubi Soft
Multiplayer: 2-36 players, TCP/IP, LAN, Internet
Platform: PC
Graphically, Ghost Recon's new engine is an impressive debut. It renders long stretches of terrain adorned with foliage and trees that sway in the breeze. It features graceful environmental lighting and weather effects. The textures are beautiful and subtle. The lifelike and varied character animations are obviously drawn from the excellent work from the Rainbow Six/Rogue Spear games. Creeping through the brush with your teammates on either side of you is a sublime visual experience.
Perhaps the new engine's greatest achievement is that is solves the problem of being able to immediately see a moving object, namely another character, against a field of static polygons. In nearly any first-person shooter, you can stand still and trust your eyes to pick out the movement. But in Ghost Recon, there's a soft edge and muted palette, but it doesn't look sloopy. Instead, it realistically blends objects into the background in an almost magical combination of movement and color. You have to look closely to find a character at a distance, particularly a camouflaged one. It's never a simple matter of waiting for the telltale movement to catch your eye. Ghost Recon will have you on the edge of your seat, leaning into your monitor to find the enemy.
Unfortunately, there are a few problems with the engine. There's an aggressive draw-in range at which distant objects suddenly materialize into view. Also, there's a disappointing lack of interaction with the environment. Not only does Ghost Recon have fake doors galore, but there's almost nothing destructible in this game beyond scripted targets and the occasional window. What's worse, the engine resorts to cheesy tricks to limit where you can go -- it's bad enough that you can't climb up an incline. Even worse is that not only can you not step up a small rise, you can't even jump down. This means small drop-offs are as insurmountable as ten-foot high concrete walls. Although the maps are big, they're surprisingly limited because of these tricks. And since the limits aren't always intuitive, the early stages of learning a map involve figuring out where the game will and won't let you go.
Ghost Recon features a lot of "gamey" conventions like the map limits. Some of these are obviously design decisions that are good in theory. For instance, you have to unlock most of the content. Finishing a mission lets you play that map using the single-player modes Firefight (kill all enemies) or Recon (make your way to the extraction zone). This is an artifact of the Rainbow Six/Rogue Spear games and it adds incentive to the single-player campaign. However, to access many of the advanced weapons, you have to unlock specialist characters by accomplishing optional secondary objectives during the campaign.
Another "gamey" convention is the way characters are equipped. There's a hard limit of two items for every character, meaning one solider can never carry weapons, binoculars and grenades. You can't have claymores and extra clips and a grenade launcher mounted on your assault rifle counts as a secondary item. You can never pass equipment between characters during a mission, and demolition missions can be scuttled because the guy with the demo charges dies.
Between missions, your troops earn experience points that can be applied to their skills, adding an interesting roleplaying element to the game...in theory. In practice, this means later in the game it's a given that you're going to reload after someone's been shot. Since you can save anywhere in Ghost Recon, you're going to be doing the "save and reload" dance regularly to protect your characters' hard-earned experience points.
These sorts of design decisions aren't inherently bad since they encourage working with your team members, but this strange juxtaposition of realism and gamey conventions is confusing. On one hand, Ghost Recon is a realistic tactical combat operations sim in which you command your men on the fly. On the other hand, it's a first-person shooter combined with a role-playing game that plays according to certain game design abstractions and requires a lot of saving and reloading. Getting ping-ponged back and forth between these two design philosophies doesn't exactly help the immersion factor.
Perhaps the most damning problem with Ghost Recon is something that's plagued the Rainbow Six/Rogue Spear series all along: the enemy AI makes no effort to appear human or fallible. It has phenomenal aim and uncanny detection capability. In close-quarters siege situations like Rogue Spear's hostage rescues, this is adequate for modeling high-strung terrorists with itchy trigger fingers. But in outdoor covert military operations across long ranges, this just doesn't cut it. Half the battle is figuring out where the shooting is coming from, but the enemy AI doesn't play by the same rules. Rustle a leaf, fire a silenced shot, or step into some indeterminate activation radius and you're a goner.
This not only makes the game inordinately difficult, but it also undermines the action. Whereas there should be intense gun battles with suppression fire and soldiers peeking around cover, there are only sudden deaths. If there's one thing we've learned from games like Close Combat, Counter-Strike, and Operation Flashpoint, it's that gunfire doesn't have to kill someone to be effective; if it can make an enemy take cover and not shoot back, gunfire is doing its job. Sadly, Ghost Recon makes no attempt whatsoever to model this with it's I-see-you-and-now-you're-dead-end-of-story dynamic.
To make matters worse, this superhuman AI doesn't apply to your own soldiers who routinely get themselves killed by casually hanging out as if they were on a training mission. When the firing starts, they're liable to all but stand out in the open and ask to get shot. The command system is pretty coarse and there's no easy way to use it when the action heats up, so babysitting doesn't even work very well. Since Ghost Recon expects you to jump from character to character as you play (another "gamey" convention), the best way to keep your team alive is manually position your soldiers and tell them to hold their positions then creep forward, one man at a time. It's enough to make a guy miss Rogue Spear's interminable planning phases.
Ghost Recon's missions themselves are interesting and varied. You'll get to accompany armored assaults and raid sub pens and airports. You'll wade into swamps to rescue downed pilots. City battles are especially exciting as you move down wide streets and carefully advance from building corner to building corner. Nighttime missions and storms add extra atmosphere to the already impressive maps.
As a multiplayer game, Ghost Recon fares better, but there's a sense that it wasn't really as developed as much as it could have been. Finding a game can be accomplished through the new Ubi.com service, as well as through GameSpy Arcade. Many of the multiplayer modes seem suited to traditional Deathmatch action instead of Ghost Recon's lethal gunplay. King of the hill games (called Hamburger Hill) are almost a joke since whoever's on the "hill" has a life expectancy of five or six seconds. Search and Rescue missions play out strangely with their indestructible hostages who would serve as perfect human shields if they didn't draw so much fire. Unlike Red Storm's other games, in which you had one life to live, you can set Ghost Recon for character respawning in traditional deathmatch games.
Ghost Recon is a decisive step backwards from the combat dynamics of Operation Flashpoint and the team command structure of SWAT 3. It's particularly disappointing considering how well Red Storm has developed the Rainbow Six/Rogue Spear titles. Of all people, they should understand how to translate realistic combat dynamics into a compelling game. Instead, Ghost Recon seems confused not only about what it's trying to do, but how to do it.[/u] |
