Fun, exciting, and a welcome balance between the slow, deliberate old-school Ghost Recon and today's action shooters.
Ghost Recon: Future Soldier (GRFS) was such a welcomed experience for me after the absolute brutalization of the Rainbow Six series with Vegas 1 and 2. Those games should be drug into the street and stoned to death. GRFS took the "shooting gallery" chambers of that series and expanded the playing field, making areas of engagement broader with more angles of approach. A few times, I felt like I was playing the original 2001 GR with a wide-open field and total control over which direction to fire on the enemy. When shooting did start, tangos took immediate action with taking cover, flanking, suppressive fire, and the action with from paced and deliberate to heck in a hand basket in seconds. I was able to respond not just with a responsive cover system, but I could also vault over obstacles and sprint to better angles to get the drop on the tangos. They answered, of course, with a screen-shaking cover fire that had me instinctively ducking behind my controller. The AI of my three teammates compensated by being more than capable, with crack shots, counter-flanking, and adequate cover usage. In the rare moments they did take a bullet, they could be patched up and back in the fight quickly, yet none of their abilities completely offset the balance of gameplay as they were neither perfect nor indestructable.
When things are quiet, the "sync shot" function where all four members line up shots, then fire at the same time, is probably the source of the most fun I've had with a shooter in years. Odds are quickly evened up as four, and sometimes more, tangos get dropped immediately before the rest of the enemy catch on. The slow-motion pop of the headshots is brutally satisfying and never gets old. Beyond that, however a simple focus fire command, along with a heal teammate command, is the only true control you have over your team. First seen in 2004's GR2, your team moves with you and you can't leave them behind or tell them to post up on one end while you move to another. Frustrating when you want to do a proper "fire and flank" maneuver.
There is still no function for outfitting your troops the way you want, selecting which gun each gets, but they come adequately armed and have silencers out automatically when you need. I liked how the AI recognized my stealth gameplay and responded accordingly. The wide range of modifications you can make to your own gun is almost a game in itself, and trying out different settings of grips, scopes, and barrels on different guns for different gameplay adds to the replay value. I was perfectly happy with my highly modified MK14 head-splitter (a DLC feature) until I threw a short scope on a Stoner 96 with a front grip and redefined rock n' roll. Other equipment goodies such as the sensor grenades, magnetic vision, thermal vision, and highly advertised cloak armor were very well muted and did not make me feel invincible or unfairly advantaged yet gave me a good edge for 10-1 odds.
Still, this is primarily a console game, and as such has to be watered down for the thumb-stick controls and the younger crowd in general. More than once I noted a missed shot counted as a kill, almost an AI statement of "close enough". To keep the action hero crowd engaged, GRFS also has rail shooter and some heavily scripted sequences. I won't lie, some of these were quite difficult and did get my pulse pounding (one of the segments of shooting from a chopper was surprisingly difficult) but it's definitely a stray from traditional GR play. One sequence of a remote-controlled mech that lobs grenades a far distance quickly turned everything into an all-too-easy strategy game and was more laughable than intriguing. Still, any one of these modes were very short lived and I was back on the ground lining up headshots and moving quietly and deliberately in no time.
The game is not perfect, of course. While the cutscenes showed interesting character qualities of the team, the overall story was nothing new or particularly interesting. The graphics, overall, were pretty but nothing to scream about. The color palette was a bit washed-out in many places. The cloak effect on the team was well done and any uncovered skin remained visible for a creepy effect. There were plenty of graphic glitches, mediocre water effects, but what bothered me the most was the trees were static! The trees in 2001 GR swayed in the wind, why not the trees in the 2012 game? Another disappointment was the ballistics. There is absolutely no bullet drop or leading of targets. You put the crosshairs on the head and pull the trigger, no matter what range or how fast a target is moving. This was a major let down with all the mid-range sniping I did. Adding to it all, your team is automatically invisible no matter how close they get to the enemy in stealth mode. I had team members literally run into tangos while sneaking with no response, yet a tango that stared at me directly while I was cloaked still drew fire. In one of the end missions where I had to rescue a prisoner, he crawled on stairs in full light in front of a guard with, again, no response. Very distracting.
Regardless, GRFS was highly entertaining and I look forward to playing the campaign again with a buddy in co-op online. I've spent a couple of hours playing VS matches and I find it tiresome and frustrating. All too often my character was stuck in a cover mode and couldn't respond fast enough to someone running up on me. Then again, I'm not much of an online VS kind of player. I can't hit squat with thumb sticks when I have to shoot fast. The varied modes, some with rotating mission objectives on the fly, were intriguing, however, and a fun concept, but I spent too much time dying to really enjoy them. I'll stick with the story game and play it again, and maybe a third time through, going loud with full-auto or getting close with my PDW and whispering "tango down" with each kill. It's good to have you back, Ghost Recon.