3 out of 5 stars

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands is a great military shooter that turned out to be slightly disappointing. Don’t get me wrong: Wildlands does a great job of immersing the player into a world full of mystery that is just waiting to be explored. The game takes place in the mountainous region of the South American country of Bolivia, and your objective is to eliminate the Santa Blanca Cartel, ruled by the corrupt leader El Sueño.

The map in Wildlands is gigantic. Ubisoft’s representation of Bolivia looks amazing; though Ubisoft claims it is not at all like the real Bolivia. It is within these different provinces of Bolivia in which the ghost team takes down Santa Blanca’s henchmen (buchones) one by one in order to reach El Sueño. Santa Blanca runs four operations: Production, Influence, Smuggling, and Security.

As for map design, there is nothing that is specifically astounding about it. If Wildlands is trying to be like GTA V, which had ramps, buildings, and tunnels where stunts could be done, then nothing in Wildlands sticks out.

In order to take down a buchon, you need to complete anywhere from 4-6 missions. You can then decide to move on to the next buchon, or explore the rest of the province to find various weapons, accessories, and skill points which allow you to level up your character.

To be blunt, the missions are awfully repetitive. In the majority of the missions, you either interrogate someone, kill someone, or steal something. That’s it. Every so often you might get something different. Completing missions stealthily is a pain. Crouching behind objects doesn’t seem to help much considering that enemies seem to have eagle eye vision. A couple of missions require you to go into a base without being detected. Sometimes an enemy might see you, and become alarmed. Quickly killing this person is no use, being detected for even the slightest bit of time can fail you the mission.

Multiplayer saves this game from becoming a horrible game. Playing with friends makes the game much more fun and interesting than single player. Single player can sometimes be boring, especially when traveling from place to place.

The story of the game is pretty much optional, which is honestly a good feature. Players that are interested in the story could watch the cutscenes, while others who could care less can just choose not to watch them. Weather the videos are chosen to be watched or not is completely up to the player.

Wildlands looks like a great military shooter on the cover, but falls short of most expectations. A lacking single player, but great multiplayer keeps this game alive. It is still entertaining enough to keep players coming back the next day for more mayhem.