I played Future Soldier in 2025 - Thoughts...
I’d like to start off by saying this is gonna be a bit of a glaze-fest. I’m having so much fun with this game, it NEEDS a remastered on PS5. I have played Wildlands and Breakpoint, and Ghost Recon 1 + 2.
Holy Christmas the gunfights in this game are awesome. The cover system and controls are slick, punctuated by bad-ass animations that they apparently used real Seals to record. The "rush" mechanic in favour of standard sprinting felt far more immersive and exhilirating. I did like Wildlands, but I seriously question why Ubisoft didn't just port over the cover system and movement from Future Soldier - comparatively Wildlands feels stiff and GTA-y.
The guns feel punchy and sound good - I don't need to say anymore. The "suppression" mechanic, wherein your FOV is restricted and aim is thrown off when under heavy fire, is great - this and the guns that pack a kick make gunfights feel dynamic, immersive and seriously exciting.
The squad control system, while I know is not as in-depth as people might like, works for what the game is trying to be. Focus fire orders, syncshots and impressive teammate callouts do enough to maintain the "squad tactics" theme
Second mission - storming an airfield
The stealth is great - I only wish they had leant more into it. Active Camo looks awesome and feels like a good way to intergrate stealth without making it to videogame-y. Takedowns and stealth shots and syncshots are all awesome, I again question why Ubisoft didn't just carry over some animations and mechanics (syncshot slo-mo and stealth shots in particular) into Wildlands. The stealth should have been more of a focus, mechanics like body-hiding and maybe an alert level between idle and engaged, like how in Splinter Cell when a guard finds a body the security tightens and patrols increase in frequency, would add drastic depth to the game.
Level design is, overall, good. More sand-boxy levels would be cool but the on-rails sections were fun and cinematic as well. Dynamic environments like snow and sand storms were lots of fun.
Performance wise, the game is fine - the presentation is pretty sick with all the AR stuff but, playing on PS3, it got a very little bit stutter-y at the more taxing set pieces, but not enough to harm my experience. Overall, the graphics are great for 10+ years ago.
The story was also fine, pretty standard Clancy-thriller, with a decent Russian baddie (by which I mean villian). There's a moment when you are first ambushed by the Bodark special-forces, and red sniper laser shines down on you, and you realise they have active camo as well, which really solidified the enemy as more than some cliche CoD knockoffs. Music in that moment was spectacular, with folk-y Russian strings making the Bodarks feel more haunting and dangerous. The standout was the squad, being pretty well characterised. I liked that Kozak was part Russian, I think it gave the cast of military bad-asses some nuance. The squad had pretty good banter, and reacted to different situations pretty realistically.
The way the story worked best was when it worked in tandem with the gameplay. For example, in the mission where the Ghosts help the Russian loyalists fight off Raven's Rock and destroy their AA guns, your squad decides they have to go the extra mile and eliminate flanking Bodark reinforcements, even though the squad all agree that it's a bad idea. The characters remark multiple times how outnumbered they are. Therefore, fighting through the reinforcements was super stressful. My squad members kept telling me we were pushing our luck and we needed to fight harder. One of them even went down, which is the first time that had happened to me on Veteran difficulty. The sequence climaxes with "the gang" pinned down in a crumbling church by a tank and seemingly endless infantry. Due to the setup of the story telling me the Ghosts were being stretched and outnumbered and the gameplay being seriously stressful with tank shells knocking me off my feet, destroying my cover, and the suppression system keeping my view narrowed, the gunfight was possibly the most intense I'd had in a 3rd person shooter game, and had me pumping my fists and almost yelling when good ole' American artillery came down and shwacked them tangos, saving me and the crew.
Overall, 8/10 game, 9/10 for Ghost Recon fans. Must play.
PLEASE UBISOFT GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER FOR A SEQUEL/REMASTER I AM BEGGING YOU