Trying every PS-Plus Extra game: Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands

I'll sum the entire experience that I had in this one sentence: Too big, too much repetition, too much grinding for the hopes of finally getting a good sniper rifle."

This is my first foray into the Tom Clancy games and I only did it out of morbid curiosity and because I am nearly completely out of indie games to play in the PS-Plus Extra catalogue. I am not a fan of FPS games because I just don't have the wherewithal to master them. I know people that absolutely LOVE FPS games but I am not one of them. That being said, this game, which I will refer to as Wildlands henceforth, is NOT an FPS game but is more of an RPG with FPS elements.

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While I only require myself to play any game for 1 hour before writing how I feel about it initially, I ended up playing this one for 4 or 5 hours and was relatively pleased because it reminded me a LOT of Far Cry 5, which was the last game that I played that I absolutely loved. The running around to various places and accomplishing various objectives is a lot of fun, especially when your overall objective can be accomplished a number of ways since the main thing that you have to do in any particular region is to destabilize the area's control from the cartel and then are given access to the "boss" of that area. Once this happens, you eliminate the boss and this gives you an opportunity to get to the main boss a number of ways. There is no one path to victory in this game, and I think that is good.

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There are many paths you can take to get to "El Sueno" and complete the game but of course, I never made it anywhere near that far. After I knocked out 3 of the bosses, I found myself getting quite annoyed with the very repetitive nature of the game and therefore didn't feel like going another round knowing that with slight differences that the game was going to be essentially exactly the same as it had been up to this point.

Combat works in a variety of ways and only on certain missions are you forced to approach an area without being detected. You are far more effective if you are working without being spotted, but this approach, which consists of doing recon from a distance and locating enemy soldiers is something that is very fun at first but quickly becomes "meh" around the 40th time that you have to go through it. Sure, in many missions you could just rush the front gate but they have safeguards in place to prevent you from doing this in the form of reinforcements and roaming patrols that can screw up anything that you are doing regardless of how much time you have put into planning the perfect silent approach.

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The drone is a very important part of overall gameplay as you will constantly use it to highlight enemies from afar and order your buddies to do a "one shot, one kill" assault. I like this aspect of the game but it brought about another form of frustration in me. My partners have AMAZING sniper rifles that I do not have access to. They can get "in position" and perform flawless headshots from afar but when I pull up my sniper rifle with the hopes of doing the same I find that I have a POS sniper rifle and it is damn near useless. Basically, despite being the leader of the group, I am the least useful in actual combat. I realize that this would change if I would hunt down the actual sniper rifle somewhere and I know that Ubisoft would absolutely LOVE it if I got tired of waiting and just went and spent real-world money so I could have it NOW. This is something that I never have done, do not do now, and never will do. Microtransactions have ruined a number of game franchises that I previously loved and I am not going to feed that beast even if it would make my gaming experience better.

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The overall map of the entire game is absolutely massive and I would like to go out on a limb here and say that I think that it is too big. I love it when a game has a ton of explorable areas and this would be fantastic if it weren't for the fact that nearly every single mission ends up feeling the same after you do a couple dozen of them. You stay out of range of snipers, move your drone in, mark isolated targets, take them out, and gradually work your way further and further into the complex repeating the same thing time and time again until you eventually make your way to main objective of going to that building in the first place.

Then upon completion of said objective, you are given another objective that is normally ages away from where you are currently standing. There are a ton of optional sidequests to do along the way, sure. However, these generally reward you with things that really aren't that special and take a lot of time. So once I started to just do the main story missions I found myself on a really long helicopter ride or god forbid, an epically long car ride, to the next destination to repeat the "tag and snipe" tactics all over again.

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This brings me to my next beef with the game and that is how the helicopters, especially the ones outfitted with miniguns, are massively underpowered. They do not accurately reflect how much of a huge advantage one of these things would actually provide if you had one at your disposal. I don't know how many times I have fired hundreds of rounds at targets highlighted in the distance only to have them continue on their way or take cover behind a wooden box and emerge unscathed. Therefore, attempting to weaken a keep's defenses by raining hell upon them before doing a ground strike, is mostly a waste of time. You are better off just landing the copter somewhere nearby the base and infiltrating, painstakingly, from the ground with your team of 4.

The fundamentals of the game are sound but with all the empty space between objectives and how something that you are initially very excited about getting like a minigun equipped helicopter being almost completely useless, are a huge letdown.

It is also completely silly that you can land one of these helicopters 80 meters or so away from a keep and none of the guards are at all alerted by this. They just keep doing the rounds because I guess helicopters land in a field near them on a regular basis.

The NPC's are also quite poorly done. The citizens of Bolivia don't seem to be all that bothered when a tactical team runs down the street having a firefight and they just go about their day heading to the docks to do some fishing or head to the market. If this is the best that they could do as far as NPC reactions were concerned, it would have been better, in my mind, to just not have them there at all.

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_{4 trucks got blown up at the 7-11... welp, time to go to school!}

I enjoyed the 4 hours or so that I put into this game but honestly, the game needs more diversity of objectives or even just a streamlining of events to keep me interested. Not EVERYTHING has to be open world you know.

My final analysis after my short time playing this game is that I think that most users are going to become bored with the repetitive nature of the game after a few hours. Oh and the load times are ok but still relatively massive and arduous, but I expected that from a game of this size.

Opinion: You'll get bored

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Games I have already tried in my journey to play at least 1-hour of every PS-Plus Extra game

• Gravity Rush 2 (action adventure game with fast movement in every direction. It has RPG elements and a pretty decent story. Make it past the first hour and the game really opens up. Recommended)
• Oddworld: Soulstorm (2D+ platformer with great graphics, sound, and voice-acting. Unfortunately it is plagued with a lot of repetition. Recommended for a few hours)
• Bee Simulator (sort of like a flying FPS game but with no combat. It's graphically impressive and filled with tidbits of knowledge about bees... unfortunately it is repetitive as hell and gets boring fast. Not recommended)
• Prison Architect (a prison management simulator game similar to SimCity. It's a great game but just like most simulation games, it just isn't very playable using a controller. Not recommended on PS4)
• Hotline Miami 2 (a top-down shooter with gruesome violence and terrible AI. Would be great for speedrunners and hardcore gamers. Casuals like me are going to quickly tire with it)
• Battle Chasers: Nightwar (turn based RPG of medium-length that does a good job of teaching you how to play in the first hour. It's pretty old-school and I happen to like that... recommended)
• Chorus (3rd person open-world space fighting game. It's graphically impressive but combat is too repetitive to really hold your interest for the entire story. Still recommended though.)
• Portal Knights (a very well made survival action builder game similar to Minecraft. I really enjoyed this and look forward to playing it more. Recommended)
• Saints Row: The Third (clever and funny FPS game that intentionally puts you in impossible and absurd situations. It's innovative and humorous but ultimately quite dated and got repetitive and boring pretty quick. Not recommended)
• Balan Wonderworld (A rather beautiful 3D(ish) platformer that is extremely easy but still engaging enough to hold your attention for a few hours. Recommended for casual gamers)
• The Artful Escape (an adventure game of sorts with awesome visuals and music, but repetitive areas and controls combined with IMO far too much dialogue makes this game get boring, fast... Worth a look but not recommended to play)
• Until Dawn (interactive horror game that you don't really control a great deal of. It's reasonably entertaining, you can't lose, and the graphics and sound a pretty great. It's not really a game but I enjoyed it and played it to its finish. Recommended)
• 11-11: Memories Retold (a WW1 story that doesn't actually involve much input on the player's part. The game is very boring despite having a wonderful graphical style: Not recommended)
• Desperados 3 (a real time tactics / stealth game that I personally do not feel belongs on consoles at all. If you have never played these sorts of games on PC your opinion might be different. This one gets a "maybe.")
• Maneater (Action RPG where you play the role of a deadly shark. The idea is decent but ultimately the extremely repetitive gameplay makes this one easy to miss. Not recommended)
• TorqueL (physics puzzle platformer that is simplistic at first but quickly becomes maddeningly difficult. Gets boring pretty quickly on consoles and would be better suited as a time-waster on mobile devices. Not recommended on PS4)
• Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon: Turn-based cutesy RPG that is extremely story-driven just like anything Square is involved in. If you are huge fan of Final Fantasy you might like it, for me it was one hour then done forever.
• XCOM 2 : (Turn-based Sci-Fi game set in a dystopian future where you are part of the rebellion. Despite a very slow start IMO the game really gets involved later on... recommended)
• Darksiders Genesis (Top-down hack and slash that reminds me a lot of Diablo 3 but with a more restricted environment. It's very fast paced and as easy or difficult as you want it to be. It's a lot of fun and therefore comes highly recommended.)
• Guardians of the Galaxy (a copy/paste of so many other RPG's out there with too many cutscenes as is so typical of Square-Enix. Recommended for superfans of the movies, but not for really anyone else.)
• Injustice 2 (a DC comics oriented fighting game with tons of characters and IMO extremely complicated gameplay. It could be great for someone who is willing to devote enough time to memorizing all of this, but I am not that guy.)
• Life is Strange: Before the Storm episode 1 (A graphic adventure that isn't really a game so much as it is a movie that you have some control over. Recommended for people looking for something extremely casual but with a very well-written story)
• Evil Dead: The Game (a team based multiplayer game that has the humor and gore that you would expect from anything done by Evil Dead. Unfortunately, it doesn't really stand out from the pack well enough for me to give it high props. Recommended for a short while - see if you disagree with me)
• Immortals: Fenyx Rising (A Zelda-esque open-world game based on Greek mythology that is one of the best games I have played in a while. Highly recommended)
• Pixel Piracy (an 8-bit adventure game of sorts that puts you in the role of a pirate ship commander. I'd love to tell you what the objective in this game is, but I don't know what it is. I was extremely bored after the required 1-hour of play and immediately deleted the game from my hard drive. Not recommended)
• I am Satsuna (an old-school turn-based RPG developed by Squre Enix that functions exactly like Squaresoft games from the 90's. Recommended for people who really love that sort of game environment but not so much for anyone else)
• Killzone: Shadow Fall (an open-world(ish) FPS game with RPG elements. I found the interface to be hard on the eyes and that they really do a terrible job of teaching you how to actually play the game. Not recommended for average gamers but possibly a real winner for veterans of the franchise because the story seems quite good.)
• Dead by Daylight (A multiplayer survival horror game that was probably very fresh and fun when released in 2016 but these days there are so many clones of this type of game that there isn't much incentive to play this one)
• Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands (A open-world RPG/FPS game similar to the FarCry series. IMO the world is unnecessarily huge and there is a lot of dead space with nothing in it. This means a lot of your time is spent just traveling from one mission to the next and the missions all start to feel the same after a while. I lost interest after 4 hours or so)

All other games I have already reviewed (there are a lot of them)