Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier Impressions

During its E3 press conference, Ubisoft showed off the first gameplay of the latest game in the Ghost Recon series, Ghost Recon: Future Soldier. Like the teaser trailer for the game, the demo showed that stealth plays an important role, as it appears that all members of your team have access to an active camo system. Indeed, the demo even started with one of the ghosts walking up to an enemy soldier and performing a point-blank stealth kill with his firearm. From there, we got a better glimpse of the environment--a northern European coastline that appears to have fallen victim to some catastrophic attack. Buildings are falling apart, and the ocean looked drained, leaving boats, buoys, and other objects sitting on the beach.

As it turns out, the ghosts can use these objects as cover. And they do so to move in on their targets, which they can identify using the new cross comm system. Once they see their target's position, they move forward on the beach, toward the dock, and closer to the intended target (whom they have to capture alive). The ghosts stay in their camo and move just underneath the dock where they take out an enemy sitting on the dock and another enemy sitting in a machine-gun nest. It's worth pointing out that the second enemy has thermal vision, so theoretically he could have seen the ghosts if they were in his line of sight. As the demo continues, the ghosts move quietly past several enemies and make their way to the area above the docks where the target is.

Here we find out that they have to use some teamwork to take the target alive, because he's surrounded by what appear to be Russian Spetsnaz soldiers. The team of ghosts splits up--some head to the left behind a Hummer, and others head to the right. We see the main ghost soldier sneak up on his target, and just as he's about to grab him, his teammates take down all three enemy soldiers at once with some precise shooting.

With that sequence complete, we got to see a different type of battle on the same beach. A ghost sniper takes position in a building overlooking the beach. From there he sees an enemy helicopter airlifting some equipment into the area, but before the pilot drops off his cargo, the sniper kills him. This causes the helicopter to go spinning out of control and presumably crash. In this same battle, we get a glimpse of the cover system. Ghosts can move from object to object with some fluidity, but you can't stay in one place for too long--it appears that objects are destructible, so enemy fire makes short work of them.

Fans of previous games in the series should be pretty excited, and we're especially interested to get our hands on the game to see how smooth the controls are. We’ll have more on Ghost Recon: Future Solider from the show floor.