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This is an early impressions piece based on review code - look out for our final verdict on Ghost Recon Wildlands later this week.I was all ready to drop a bucket of C4 on Ghost Recon: Wildlands when I began playing last week, and there are still things I intensely dislike about it, but Ubisoft's latest Tom Clancy 'em up is growing on me, very slowly. Its greatest failing may be the narrative, which is, so far, a bluntly uncritical celebration of the so-called "war on drugs" - Richard Nixon's Quixotic, multiple-billion dollar international crackdown on the illegal narcotics trade, which has seen the US military and CIA intervening across South and Central America in a bid to quash supply.
In Ubisoft's extension of this tale Bolivia has been all but conquered by a Mexican cartel, and it's your job to bring down the latter's capos one by one, working your way up the chain of command to the big boss, El Sueño, a tattooed bruiser with Messianic aspirations. Perhaps the writing will surprise me further in, but right now this feels like the usual, callous AAA tactic of skimming the surface of a complex geopolitical scenario as a pretext for blowing the shit out of some glossy, tour-guide vistas.
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