Trying to have everything when you have almost nothing

I enjoyed my time with Ghost Recon: Wildlands two years ago. It was a fun romp with some co-op buddies even when it was a bit of a slog going into single player, but for the most part, it was competent. Cut to two years later, and the next big Ubisoft game for the season is Ghost Recon: Breakpoint. I don’t know what they did, but this is no Wildlands.

The premise of Breakpoint is that on Auroa Island, owned by a tech corporation that uses the land as a manufacturing facility as well as a compound for the employees that work there, has been taken over by a rogue group of mercenaries lead by former Ghost Cole Walker, who is played by Jon Bernthal. Nomad, the player character, is sent in to figure out what exactly is going on and is now marooned in the wilderness and has to work with local survivors to gather the rest of the Ghosts and take down Walker.

Platforms: XB1, PS4, PC
MSRP: $59.99
Price I’d pay: With co-op friends $30/solo play $20

Breakpoint takes on the same formula players of other Ubisoft games have come to know – there’s a large open world where players can go and do what they want, take on missions that lead to discovery of new areas of said world, and level up while utilizing a skill tree to grow stronger in abilities as well as equipment and gear. It’s all here and for the most part it works, but what the game is wrapped around is not something great. It’s honestly the little things to bring down Breakpoint.

So, taking a page out of The Division’s book, players can acquire new guns and armor for their Nomad. These will offer up better attack and armor stats as well as other boosts depending on the rarity of the item. Think of it like a lite version of The Division’s loot system. The problem here is that most enemies can still be taken down with a standard head shot so getting a gun with a higher attack number is only really helping out in certain aspects.

Players gain XP through doing missions, killing enemies and discovering areas. That will then go to the player’s level and the use of skill points. Points are put into a skill tree that offers up a specific class for the player character as well as passive abilities that can be equipped to give better stats and abilities to the player. On top of that, players will get challenges for the class they choose that will then level up the actual class and have even more to add on to their loadout. There are three different forms of progression here and that’s just in the leveling system.

The biggest and most egregious issue is the confusing mission layout and menus. So, looking at the mission menu, I would be lost trying to figure out what I was doing. Since it looks like a character board you’d see in police procedurals, trying to find a certain mission proved to be confusing to say the least. Not to mention, I’m not just taking on missions for people, I’m also investigating what is actually going on on the island. So there were times I would wonder why the mission isn’t complete when I didn’t realize I had to go into the confusing menus, navigate to the intel collected and click “read” before the mission was over. By the end of this, I was looking like the conspiracy Charlie meme from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

Let’s talk about the bugs in Breakpoint if only for a second. I got stuck on the terrain, ran into invisible barriers that shouldn’t be there, and had the game hardlock my Xbox One X twice while reviewing. The AI is also pretty bad. Either they can see a single pixel of my body and shoot me with deadly aim, or they just run out in front of me and allow me to mow them down without a second thought. Oh, and motorcycles in this game are from another planet for something. Every time I used one something crazy would end up happening. Either I would be sent flying, or a blade of grass would throw me from the bike, or my character would have a difficult time trying to actually get on the bike when it was next to anything at all.

Remember in The Division when a player was inside a building, they would have the objective marker show them which rooms to go through in order to make it out of the building? Or if an objective was a mile away, it would lead you to it through sections of the map? That doesn’t happen in Breakpoint. In Breakpoint, I would get an objective marker that was two miles away and would just have to guess on how to get there. My co-op partner and I did a mission that ended with us fighting multiple enemies through a series of caves. After completing the mission, we wanted to start another one. The new mission marker is the location miles away from us and we ended up having to backtrack though a confusing set of caves for five minutes before finally finding our way out of the caves to even begin travelling to the actual mission area. That’s what the majority of time I spent in Breakpoint devolved into – trying to figure out where to go.
While the shooting and moment to moment game play was fine, with the AI being the way it was, it was really only enjoyable when I was play co-op with friends. Even then, we had issues trying to get along with the game.

One thing the game really does have going for it is the visuals. In 4K on the Xbox One X, the game looks amazing, with some spectacular lighting effects and draw distance. Explosions look particularly great and since I like blowing things up, I got to see them a lot.

As many have already talked about, the amount of microtransactions in Breakpoint is ridiculous. From when I was playing I saw bundles that had weapons, armor, in game money, skill points, and cosmetics in them. Now, while I have no issues with any of this since the competitive online mode is balanced for only skill-based gameplay with no advantages, just seeing the amount of them made me cringe.

It seems like Breakpoint saw the Assassin’s Creeds, the Far Cry’s, and The Divisions and decided it wanted to incorporate that into its own game. The issue is that throwing everything and the kitchen sink into the game isn’t going to make it great. They have a decent frame for Breakpoint and the feel of it is fine, but when trying to navigate the world or even the menus gives you a headache, it may be time to take a step back and think on what you need to do to make it better. The only way to play this game is with co-op friends. Single player people should avoid this one. You will be bored and frustrated within two hours. Even with some friends the issues will become bothersome, but at least you’ll have someone to complain with.

Review copy of game provided by publisher.