Okay guys, E3 is officially over! There’s lots of footage to go through and potential games to think about. Ubisoft had a pretty decent showing, but one thing kind of bothers me. Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands. Is it beautiful? Oh my lord that game is pretty. It’s a terrific picturesque game built in South America [specifically Bolivia]. It’s vibrant, it’s alive. Through it all sneak our heroes: Ghosts; unseen, unheard, as they move through the Narcos and obliterate them with bullets. Do I think that sounds fun? Duh. As a child of the 80s, I still very much remember D.A.R.E., and how many of my classmates broke their D.A.R.E. promise, and made McGruff the Crime Dog sad. This game is basically Reagan’s “War on Drugs: The Video Game”. But it’s “Us vs. Them”, only in a different locale, and a different reason. Sure, you are parachuting down into the jungle a’la Contra, pumping shells into unsuspecting criminals, that makes me feel like a badass.
But at the end of the day, it’s basically every Tom Clancy game ever, only this time it’s the War on Drugs. I know I’m a little bit of a hypocrite here; I play every new Dynasty Warriors/Samurai Warriors game, mostly to see the parts of the story they add/take away. And they’re fun. But I hope desperately Ubisoft makes an effort to make it different from the various Tom Clancy stories they’ve already released. They’ve done a similar game already in the Ghost Recon series, with “Ghost Recon: Jungle Storm”. Except that one was set Colombia, though that one is more about terrorists plus drugs. There is one thing they’re doing I love: It’s going to be open world, except it’s not an MMO. While I do think it’s a lot of the same fucking thing over again, it’s a Tom Clancy game, so it’s going to sell like hotcakes. Eventually, people are going to get wise; so far, from what I’ve seen, this one is at least a bit of a departure, because it’s not “Terrorism, Global Conflict, Treachery, Overthrowing governments”. Looks like, so far it’s just “Drugs are bad, let’s kill those assholes”! It could be interesting, but it could also wind up being the same old shit every other Tom Clancy game has. Could we be on the precipice of something new and exciting for the shooter genre?
