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74. Ghost Recon Breakpoint.  Completed and platinumed. 

From the Ubisoft of old to the Ubisoft of today… I’ve heard Ghost Recon Breakpoint had a bad launch but I can only go by the game I experienced in 2021 which is fun…in small doses. 

Firstly, the good: I really like the character’s movement. The heft to every action he makes and every grunt he murmurs coupled with the visible slime and dirt on his body adds to the sense of “grit” that plays into the tactical shooter fantasy. It reminded me a lot of the new MGS games in that regard (although  without the clever hidden systems and attention-to-detail of say, well, see username). It also has some of the best character animations I’ve seen in recent years - not quite on the level of Uncharted 4, mind you,  but really good nonetheless. All animations  can be cancelled as well so you’re not going to be locked into looting while an enemy is shooting at your head. I also like how the animations play into the survival elements such as the limping when injured and then, subsequently, the applying of bandages  which is a deliberately lengthy animation to make you strategic about when and where to heal.  

What saves this game is the gunplay and stealth which are very, for lack of a better term, satisfying. Weapons feel punchy and all have the option to switch between first and third person perspective when scoped. CQC kills are a bit…sadistic but feel generally rewarding to pull off since enemies are always watching each other’s sixes and distracting one enemy often alerts another. The balancing is also excellent: normal difficulty here is harder than the hardest difficulty in Ghost Recon Wildlands - at least what I played of the Wildlands beta. Even on normal difficulty you can get overwhelmed very quickly in open combat. It took me a while until I could fight my way to victory without being downed. Part of it was skill and positioning, yes, but the other part was working out the best gadgets to have equipped in the radial wheel and when to deploy them.  For instance, the sync shot drones - which you deploy to kill all enemies tagged - is a life saver but you need to be in a position of cover to deploy it; you can’t just spam it out in the open as you’ll be downed quickly. On that note, the radial wheel is finicky and there were times where I got spotted because I accidentally threw a grenade rather than using a cloaking spray, for instance, so double check that you have, in fact, selected the right weapon before executing.

The gadgets in general are, perhaps, the one system that feels like it was baked into the game from the moment of conception due to it being a necessity to successfully complete objectives in any given situation. The same can’t be said for the other systems which are kind of just…there. Basically, this game has a bit of an identity crisis. It wants to be a tactical shooter - and it is a good tactical shooter - but it also has the forced RPG mechanics that Ubisoft just plonks on top of all their open world games now.  The difference is that in Ghost Recon Breakpoint you can tell the developers didn’t want this in the game. The dialogue options are just there for the sake of it, having no impact on how missions play out whatsoever. Weapons and armour have a gear score now which can be modded but the stat differences are so minimal that you don’t have to worry about making a build. In fact, the skill tree perks were actually more useful in that area. 

In fairness, they’ve since added ‘immersive mode’ which bypasses the gear score nonsense altogether, meaning that, in theory, you can pick up one weapon and roll with it throughout the entire game. On that note, the world parameters introduced with immersive mode are amazing: you really can customise how this game feels to your liking, such as how/if your health regenerates, how many drones and helicopters spawn in the world, how many weapons you can carry, how many bandages, how much stamina gets consumed, how much HUD is on screen, whether locations show on the map etc, etc, etc.  It’s really quite extensive so I would recommend playing around with those settings and finding what’s best for you before starting the campaign. I played on default settings because I was stuck in a hotel with a TV so small it hurt my eyes to play around with menus, but if I was at home when I launched the game I would have definitely played around with more options (outside of increasing the font size!)

I will also say that, to Ubisoft’s credit, I never felt like the gear score was having me play catchup constantly in order to push some sort of Ubisoft store booster. I went against my usual playstyle of doing all the side stuff first to be OP in main missions (for reasons I will get into later) and pretty much just critical-pathed it which put me only 25 levels lower than the final boss.  Don’t get me wrong - that’s still a huge power gap on normal difficulty, only taking two hits to be downed but it’s manageable. That said, I don’t know how I would have fared if my A.I team mates weren’t there (another addition made since launch) as I did go down once before they revived me. However, given that my A.I teammates didn’t get downed - which they would almost instantly if a boss is unreasonably high level -  I’d say a solo player would be fine here too with a bit more strategy. 

But again, that just plays into how inconsequential the whole gear score system is, as if the game is more preoccupied with looking like a looter shooter than actually being one. This is even reflected in the menus which are deliberately messy in order to make you think all the various systems seem more complex than they actually are, but when you actually dive into it you realise they just made a hilariously convoluted layout of quests and activities.  Also, while I don’t feel like any part of the game has been compromised to push some sort of booster the same can’t be said for visual customisation. I spent a lot of time in the customisation menu and was disappointed to see I couldn’t complete my Sold Snake look because the eye patch, for instance, could only be purchased with real world money. It’s as if they knew players would want to roleplay as Snake and decided to monetise it. 😆 I don’t mind cosmetic microtransactions on principle but I don’t love this game enough to spend the extra cash just to look like The Legend.

To be clear, none of the RPG elements I mentioned are bothersome - they don’t negatively affect gameplay at all but that, in a way, is kind of the problem: they don’t add anything to make the game interesting, and this game really needed some flavour to mask its biggest problem:  repetition.  I’m wary of saying a game, as a whole, is “repetitive” as that word is overused when lobbying criticisms at a game. Also, playing multiple games at once, like I do, alleviates that feeling of fatigue greatly… but even I could see that this is a nice 10 hour campaign stretched out into double that. The basic structure is always the same: you go to a camp, clear it out, locate intel either from a civilian or by interrogating one of the guards or looking at a document, then go to another camp and do the same thing and then another camp and do the same thing and then another camp and maaaybe that’s where the mission ends. I didn’t bother doing the side missions because I knew they were basically just going to be that but on a less grand scale. The only side missions I did were the faction side missions (Ubisoft like their rebel groups) which are very, very short but actually have some variety such as stealing a vehicle or taking out a swarm of drones.

In most Ubisoft games, like the aforementioned Far Cry, you've got your camps that you clear out but they're supplementary to the main quest.  Here, the outpost is the game and everything else just kind of works around it. It’s testament to how good the stealth and gunplay mechanics are here that I stuck with it but I think others will undoubtedly be far less forgiving, especially at launch without all the new additions. It’s also not helped by how dead feeling and samey the world is.  Graphically, it’s really good in some areas and subpar in others. The way the wind moves ferociously against the foliage looks great especially in 60 fps (although it’s let down by some of the worst rain effects I’ve seen in recent memory). But the world isn’t aesthetically the prettiest, a lot of the buildings are copied and pasted and there is noticeably far less civilian life - perhaps as a compromise for the graphical upgrade overall. When I wasn’t fast travelling I was just using helicopters to get around as I just had no reason, outside of related trophies, to travel by foot or car.

Repetitive gameplay and a dull environment can be carried by a good story and likeable characters but, unfortunately, Ghost Recon Breakpoint is lacking in this area. The story is so generic that I’m not even going to explain it properly - something about your former best friend going rogue, forming his own militia in pursuit of some paradiscal ideal and now you have to take him down. Or something. Also, don’t yell at me, but there is a certain soullessness to the story in that it has no respect for human life. There’s one flashback cutscene where you’re just sniping unaware enemies like you’re hunting deer that just didn’t sit right with me. I get that this is a military sim in a lot of ways and soldiers are hardened to death and killing but this story takes itself so seriously that it bothered me whereas it wouldn’t in your loud, dumb Michael Bay-ish shooters like Call of Duty. 

There is co-op but I never engaged with it outside of trophies. Besides, most players just sit in the background while you do all the work as they only need the mission completion XP, which… suits me just fine! 😆 I also didn’t care for the PVP mode,  ‘Ghost War’, and, again, only did it for the related trophies which didn’t take long. What does take long, however, is the matchmaking: you only need 8 players in total to start a game but rather than just starting with 6 and doing 3 v 3 the game will search forever for the final 2 players causing the more impatient to drop out and then you're back to square one. You also can't run and gun at the same time - you have to stop moving and then position yourself to shoot which, I suppose, is deliberate to make things harder but just feels strange.  Additionally, I’m not a fan of the 'one life to live' approach. While it does mean you have to be careful, I personally excel in PVP by learning what I did wrong and studying player patterns through repeated respawns, and that’s harder to do when you’re downed like a bitch for half the match. I know, I know, “git gud”, but I can’t “git gud" if I don’t git enough playtime. Overall, I just found the PVP boring to be honest but YMMV. 

So yeah,  Ghost Recon Breakpoint has problems but the stealth and gunplay (made even better by the myriad of options to optimise your personal Ghost experience) made it a game that I enjoyed coming back to. The mechanics are so good that continuous base clearing is fun to do for about 10 hours but the repetition of said bases coupled with what little variety there is in the form of PVP lets it down. It’s a game that plays to its strengths…but plays to them over and over again resulting in a campaign that is double the length it needs to be. I would say that if you are a Ubisoft fan - and only if you are a Ubisoft fan - you should go for it but be warned: this is daunting even by their open world standards and best played in small doses,  i.e. a few missions here and there and then play another game and so on. If you’re not a Ubisoft fan or don’t like their formulaic gameplay stay well away. This won’t do anything for you and as a stealth open world game it’s been done better.  Oddly enough, it has made me want to give Wildlands a second chance even though I hated the beta. It had a more diverse environment and I’ve heard they have made many improvements since. We’ll see.

75. Horizon Zero Dawn: Frozen Wilds DLC. Completed & got all trophies.

76. Horizon Zero Dawn  (base game) Completed (and platinumed years ago).

I completed the Frozen Wilds DLC and then launched into New Game Plus on Ultra Hard mode at level 60 (max), bringing my trophy completion to 100%.

In a nutshell, the DLC is OK. It carries over the same positive traits from the main game such as the quest structure and the creativeness of the side activities. The one tallneck in the map is a little different from the main game in that you need to find the parts to actually activate it, of which are attached to the hostile machines that surround it. There’s these new control towers scattered around the map which were almost certainly made with the shield weaver armour in mind. The basic concept is that this tower sends out an electric pulse that disables the shield weaver. It’s surrounded by the most dangerous enemy types and the goal is to override it without being detected. You can still override or destroy the tower with alerted enemies but it will be difficult seeing as your shield will be disabled and, oh yeah, the tower heals all machines every time it sends out a pulse. The reason I mention these two specific world activities is because they beautifully represent what Horizon Zero Dawn gets so right about its open world content: all of the side stuff are so thoughtful, and they constantly challenge you to actually think about how you're going to approach them. Most of all, they never outstay their welcome - notice I mentioned one tallneck in this entire DLC map? And the control towers check out without getting boring as well.

The DLC also comes with some new weapons which are not only powerful but actually forced me to swap out my Shield Weaver armour to get the most out of them. The moment I got the Shield Weaver in the base game I never swapped it out because nothing really compares to what is essentially a regenerating health bar - especially one that can withstand so much damage and regenerate so quickly that your actual health bar rarely gets touched. With the Stormslinger weapon, for instance, I had to equip a different outfit and mod it with shock resistance perks. In fact, I made the schoolboy error of not reading the weapon description when I got it and then wondering why I kept getting one-shot, not realising Alloy was committing suicide because the weapon overcharges and greatly damages her after a few successive shots. Despite this, weapons like the Stormingslinger is worth it as it melts enemies - which is what you want considering the spongey monstrosities this DLC introduced.

To put it bluntly, the new machine types are shockingly ill considered and it’s one enemy type in particular that really got on my tits which is The Scorcher. This machine is a nightmare and not in a, “wow, that was a workout”  fun way but in an annoying, messy way that makes you wonder whether anyone playtested it. It launches far too many attacks - including just vomiting fire and missiles - in a short space of time and if it knocks you over you’ll be stuck in a loop of just being knocked on flat on your arse over and over again as a result. If there’s more than one of them it just becomes a clusterfuck. They also have way too many hit points, so much so that tearing off their components - which usually does some sort of critical damage - still leaves them with a significant amount of health. (The sound feedback on tear damage is still great by the way). It’s more noticeable during the new hunter challenges because under a time limit you can see how spongey they are to the point that you have to drop logs on them when they're not looking to get down their health in time. Whereas outside of the hunter challenges I could tolerate the long slog of these battles.  

Additionally, Frozen Wilds' story is just not very interesting - it’s less about Alloy and her journey and more about the Banuk tribe who aren’t that interesting. The weakest aspect of the main game were its characters, other than Sylens, so when you make a DLC that’s all about the side characters all it does is shine a spotlight on its faults. Alloy is a Disney princess - her entire arc is peak Disney-princess-adventure in which she starts off as an outcast and then becomes this princess badass warrior goddess with a foreign king at one point literally offering his hand in marriage. I mean, really.  You care for her because of how she is treated early on but I feel everything that is interesting about her is what she does or what happens to her rather than who she is, and I hope the sequel improves on this. I also hope she’s not a sexless virgin in the sequel - It’s OK to have a flirt option every once in a while. It’s so... strange because the voice actress, Ashly Burch, (see what I did there?) is amazing and you can see that signature sass coming through at times, especially when interacting with Sylens or creep Nil but the Disney mould of her character doesn’t allow her to cut loose. 

And those face animations, oof.  Obviously this is a huge open world RPG so handcrafted cut scenes are not always possible, but the automated animations were poor even against the standards set at the time, and way worse than Mass Effect Andromeda which got absolutely pilloried at launch for the same issue. In fact, Mass Effect Andromeda, after the patches, is far better in the face animations department than Horizon Zero Dawn. Every character in Horizon moves like they have some sort of tick - their heads and eyes twitch in a strange manner that makes them appear unwell. It’s improved slightly in Frozen Wilds with NPCs having more appropriate expressions but it’s still bad. I think the face animations got a pass because the rest of the game is easy on the eyes (at the time).

Frozen Wilds also comes with some new abilities which are…OK, I guess? They don’t really feel like endgame skills despite the DLC being released after the main game. The most useful ones are the extra inventory space and the ability to dismantle resources into shards - or at least half the shard value of what they would be if you outright sold them to a merchant. About 50% of your time in Horizon is gathering and scavenging so being constantly told you can’t do that due to a full inventory grew tiresome fast. To now be able dismantle items not needed for crafting without having to run to merchants every 5 minutes was a much welcome addition, and one I suspect the devs added upon player feedback. There’s also a skill related to making scavenging easier but it doesn’t really work with the controls scheme Horizon has. This skill allows you to collect items without dismounting but because the ‘dismount’ and ‘gather’ prompts are mapped to the same button you often end up dismounting anyway, unless you bring your mount to a hard stop.  Whereas in a game like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey - which allows you to collect items with the triangle button without leaving the horse or stopping - you have to hold the circle button to dismount. Ubisoft Quebec mapped it this way to prevent the very aforementioned issue in Horizon. 

The other standout skill that was particularly helpful on Ultra Hard difficulty was the Dismount Strike skill which grants the ability to assassinate all human enemies and low tier machines after jumping from your mount. A great way to cheese some human enemy encounters was to lure the bandits out of the camp (which you can’t ride the machine into ) and then spam Dismount Strike while being careful not to get hit while riding. It's a guaranteed one-shot kill that greatly saves on resources and, believe me, you will want to be conservative with your resource spending since the economy on Ultra Hard is absolutely dreadful.  This difficulty mode is clearly meant to be tackled on New Game Plus only with a full inventory to boot. The merchant prices are ridiculous, going from hundreds to thousands of shards in cost to the point that it’s not worth getting the NG+ version of your weapons at 6000 shards odd for just one more mod slot. The drops from machines are pitiful, especially wire, and whereas Frozen Wilds on Normal difficulty actively encouraged you to swap gear to get the best out of your new weapons, the shield weaver on Ultra Hard is a must because your shield goes down in one hit and your health bar in two or three at max level. You can also forget about using any weapon other than the Sharpshot Bow and the Frozen Wilds weapons, unless you want battles to go on forever as you whittle away a pathetic amount of health that you can’t see.   Oh yeah, that’s another thing on Ultra Hard - enemy health bars are hidden which... is pretty cool actually.  I kind of liked guessing how close I was to downing an enemy and was often pleasantly surprised when the next hit resulted in a confirmed kill seeing as there isn’t much visual feedback back to indicate how close enemies are to death.  Sure, you can see some damage on the machine but that doesn’t necessarily mean its critical damage. 

Additionally, NG+ enemies don’t scale which means I went in at level 60 against levels that were set as low as level 7 with the highest, I believe, being around level 34. Consequently, when all calculations were done and with the aforementioned weapons and armour in use, Ultra Hard mode was more or less the same as playing on Normal. I only died three times during this run and one of them was from fall damage... I don’t dare think about what it would have been like with enemies scaled though - a Watcher would probably feel like a Thunderjaw...

It’s been said that stealth on Ultra Hard is not viable but I found that not to be true; it’s just very, very difficult to pull off which is why when you do it’s genuinely rewarding. Often the best way to move quietly through enemy territories is not to assassinate anyone at all, as just moving through an area unseen is challenging enough. Enemies are far more alert, will search for much longer, are not as easily duped by a rock and when they discover dead bodies they enter a perma-suspicious state that they will not shake until they’ve found you. This means you will almost certainly be detected eventually if you take out too many enemies. So, it often comes down to a choice of sneaking past enemies - which means missing out on valuable resources - in order to live another day, or taking the risk of getting caught by assassinating the bandits and looting their stuff. Human enemies are arguably more lethal than machines on this difficulty mode, with arrows that can take out your shield and half your health at the same time (and again, at max level). Like I said, though, that Dismount Strike skill is a great way to get past them but you’ll be entering open war when you use it.

I also appreciate that it’s truly a New Game Plus in that it doesn’t waste your time by making you play the entire opening section where factors such as level and ability progression are not present; it gets straight into The Proving quest line. It even skips tutorials such as going to merchants for certain items.  To be clear, I did NG+ on Ultra Hard purely to get the remaining trophies which only required beating the critical path, as I had done all of the side missions on my first run and was armed to the gills as a result. It was admittedly a lesser experience as so much of what makes Horizon Zero Dawn great is its open world, its side quests, its excellent cauldron level design, its corrupted zones, its reinvention of the Ubisoft tower via tallnecks, its challenging hunting grounds etc, etc, etc. When you strip that away you’re left with…a compelling, well paced campaign that entices you to uncover all its mysteries! 😆 But you do lose the emotional attachment to the world. I would have happily done the side stuff again but you can’t change the difficulty in NG+. Don’t get me wrong, Ultra Hard is manageable but I don’t fancy playing under that sort of stress for another 100 hours.  That’s not a knock on Horizon at all because it was my personal choice to blow through the main quest line for the trophy and, like I said, it's a hell of a story. 

The entire Faro plague lore is absolutely fascinating and there’s still so much left unanswered that I hope they cover in Forbidden West. I would actually love to play a full prequel game or even some sort of expansion where you get to play as either Elizabet or some random Old One having to survive in a Faro Plague ravaged planet. On that note, while the characters post Zero Dawn are all bland, the Old Ones are not.

The only character I took to post Zero Dawn was Sylens who is played by an incredible voice actor (he’ll always be Zavala to me) and is one of the few characters who don’t swing wildly between gushing over Alloy or absolutely hating her guts.  You never quite know how to feel about him because this dude has backup plans spanning the entire alphabet. I always laughed whenever he gave Alloy his many versions of, “you can’t die - you’re too valuable a resource”. He doesn’t even pretend that he’s not using her. 

So, just to recap how much I would recommend this game (before I’m inevitably accused of hating it), Horizon Zero Dawn has a brilliant campaign with a world design that is perhaps the best reinvention of a Ubisoft open world formula I have seen. The side quests (that I skipped this time round) only add to the excellent world building whilst getting you familiar with different machine types. And despite bland characters for the most part, the general lore is still fascinating with so much room for growth that I cannot wait to see expanded upon in the upcoming sequel. Just don’t play on Ultra Hard unless you’re doing a NG+ run, trust me. As for Frozen Wilds, if you liked the base game you should buy it as it’s 8 to 10 hours of that.  The rock solid core mechanics and world design philosophy is still present, albeit with more annoying and less interesting machine types that you are, at least, encouraged to overcome by creating unique weapon and armour builds. Overall, Horizon Zero Dawn is just a fantastic sci-fi story. It reminds me so much of how Assassin’s Creed used to be but, unlike Ubisoft, I trust Guerrilla Games to provide a satisfying narrative conclusion. An essential game for all Playstation owners.