E3 2011: Ghost Recon: Future Soldier Preview

At Microsoft's E3 2011 press conference, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot took to the stage to reveal that the company's upcoming third-person shooter, Ghost Recon: Future Soldier will feature Kinect support. The presentation began with a chaotic trailer of the game that revealed two soldiers (capable of cloaking themselves) infiltrating a compound. One of the stealthy soldiers fired a single shot before the madness began--explosions, headshots, flying bodies, and more explosions. We also saw one soldier fire through a wall at a heat signature of an enemy while a soldier off to the right shot an unsuspecting foe in the back of the head--gruesome stuff. The camera finally flew through a window where it reached an outdoor area, revealing a drone hovering above the action and a ghost below performing a stealth kill with his knife just before he reached into the air to grab the same drone.

The trailer was action packed, but sadly, we didn't see much in the way of standard gameplay for Ghost Recon at the press conference. Instead, we were shown a demo of the gunsmith feature--a Kinect-enabled part of Ghost Recon that lets you customize weapons (up to 20 million different combinations are reportedly available). What's nice about the Kinect functionality is that you can speak preset customization options to assemble certain weapons quickly. For example, if you say, "Optimize for close range," then gunsmith automatically assembles the best weapon based on that command. You can then test out the weapon in a shooting range using Kinect controls to aim and shoot. The stance you have to make while in this part of gunsmith seems kind of goofy, but we're interested to try it for ourselves and see how flexible and responsive it is in actuality. Additionally, you can navigate through the gunsmith menu using your hands and even disassemble or reassemble a weapon by opening or clasping your hands at the default screen.

Aside from the voice commands, these aren't things that you couldn't normally do with a controller, but the Kinect functionality seems to be a good way to streamline the process of examining and constructing a weapon for the task at hand. Moreover, just before Mr. Guillemot left the stage, he said that every Tom Clancy game from here out will feature Kinect support--certainly a big win for Microsoft's motion-control system--so you can expect more of these types of features to come down the pipe. Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier is scheduled for release later this year.