Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands Review

Wildlands is the moment Ubisoft stops building open worlds and starts building countries. Twenty one provinces run from salt flat to jungle to snow line with no loading between them, weather rolls across the whole thing at once, and you can fly a helicopter from one corner of it to the other. As a piece of engineering it is close to absurd, and the four player co-op holds together under all of it, which is why difficulty to make sits above the overall grade here.

What critics keep circling back to is the frame around that sandbox. The Santa Blanca plot wants to be a grounded thriller and an ultraviolent cartoon at the same time and lands as neither, the mission list resolves to the same scout, mark, and clear loop across two dozen lieutenants, and the computer controlled squadmates are obedient rather than convincing.

The Bolivian government lodged a formal complaint about the portrayal, which is its own comment on the tone. Play it alone and it is a long checklist in beautiful country. Play it with three people on voice chat, arguing about a night approach to a hilltop radio post while a storm comes in, and it is one of the best cooperative shooters of its generation. The B is the average of those two games.