Pre-order Ghost Recon: Wildlands

While I was at Ubisoft's booth at E3 2016, I had the opportunity to check out the upcoming Ghost Recon: Wildlands. The game was announced last year as an open-world game with up to four-player co-op, and it looked like it could be a lot of fun. To put that to the test, I was able to get some hands-on time with the game as part of a squad led by one of the developers.

First, we had a chance to get comfortable with the controls. It's a pretty standard setup of moving and shooting from a third-person perspective, except for aiming, which switches to the first-person view. You can attach or remove suppressors at will, and while you can crouch, it does not appear possible to go prone. Drones can be deployed to scout an area, and all of us had both an assault rifle and a sniper rifle to pick off more distant targets.

Our objective was to approach a group of buildings that held a man who we needed to interrogate in order to locate and retrieve some data. As the four of us reached this area, we deployed drones, which we controlled to fly around and tag enemies. The four of us coordinated a simultaneous volley of sniper fire to drop four enemies at once before they knew what hit them. However, in the ensuing firefight, the target got spooked, jumped into an SUV and peeled off down the road.

We caught up with him a short time later, as he made it to a nearby gas station populated with a few more enemies. After storming the place, I was the first to reach the target and interrogate him while the rest of the team covered the room and surrounding area. Once the interrogation was complete, my character knocked out the target with a quick pistol whip to the head, and we had a new target: a large camp a decent distance away.

We had driven to the gas station, but why drive any further when there's a perfectly good helicopter sitting right there? We boarded the heli, and I manned one of the massive door guns, but sadly, no targets presented themselves on the way over. We probably could've used the heli to assault the camp from the air, but instead, we parachuted from it to attack the camp silently.

After we regrouped, the team leader and I headed for higher ground while Ghosts 2 and 3 made their way down to the camp. The camp had enemies and civilians, so it was important to not just shoot anyone. However, it also had enemy emplacements, such as machine gun turrets and mortar pits, so there were certainly high-value targets that needed to be picked off. I provided sniper cover fire while those two made their way through the buildings below, and we all managed to get through most of the camp without sounding the alarm.

Yes, I said most of the camp. Someone, and I'm not naming names — cough, the developer — accidentally blew up something as we were just about through the camp. This sounded the alarm for the remaining handful of enemies, and it caused more to arrive via a couple of vehicles that tore into the gates. The first one we raked with small arms fire to kill the occupants, and we blew up the second one with a grenade. If you're going to go loud, go all out.

After we made our escape, we were instructed to bring up the game map and zoom backward to get a feel for how big the game's world will be. It will be split up into different zones, each with some sort of leader, and it was pretty significant in size. It'd be pretty tough to judge how large it was just from looking at it, but I doubt it's a map where you'll become immediately familiar with the entire landscape any time soon.

From what little I've played, Ghost Recon: Wildlands is shaping up to be a lot of fun. I can definitely see it as a game where co-op will be a main draw, and I can already figure out which of my friends will be the stealthy ones and which would've rather raked that camp with machine gun fire from the air. The fun part is that both ways would've worked, and coordinating with a team was a lot of fun.