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I like a squad-based shooter. In practical terms, they're a tad more realistic than the one-man army scenarios where you Rambo through an intergalactic conflagration with one rifle and God as your co-pilot. On our world, you take a wingman. Sometimes a lot of them. Guys you can trust.
And that's the problem with Ghost Recon: Future Soldier.
Thanks, Mr. Computer, for telling me the men with guns are bad.
Oh, it's not a bad game, judging by what I've seen so far. I got to play the four-player co-op mission shown during the Ubisoft press conference, and I like the look of it. But a lot of its team-based mechanics crash right into the ground when you join up with other humans, because Ubi forgot to factor something in: People are stupid.
You know what I'm talking about. Even more than other entries in the Ghost Recon series, Future Soldier pushes a stealthy approach to things. You're supposed to sneak up and murder bad people so the other bad people in earshot don't hear their friends dying horribly, allowing you to sneak up on them next. And at several points, the levels give your team opportunities to position themselves for a simultaneous four-man takedown. This makes life a bit easier. At least, for the people who aren't sorta dead.
But if you've ever played an online co-op shooter, you know that's never gonna happen. Not unless you're playing with a few buddies who know what they're doing. Otherwise, I guarantee you'll get stuck with one low-impulse-control jerk who blows your cover in under five seconds.
This is actually the stealth portion of the map.
I didn't need more than a fifth of that time to realize all three of my compadres had never seen or heard of Ghost Recon in their lives. Possibly the term "stealth shooter" simply didn't translate into High Moron. Regardless of the explanation, I can't honestly say I got to play Future Soldier to its fullest extent, because I only played it as a cover-based run-and-gun shooter. And I didn't get to use cover too much, either.
Somehow, I always managed to be the guy on point. So I had three fools behind me popping off rounds at a baddie I didn't quite finish creeping up on, or at a wall, or at some distant figure all the way across a cement bridge. And missing. Guess what happened next? Every enemy on that stage of the map came out of the woodwork. And since I was out in front, I became the primary target in every firefight. I ended up having to gun down everyone in the level. I only wish I could've done the same thing to my team.
It gets worse.
Dear Helicopter: My friends are hiding behind those crates. Please kill them.
The Ghosts in this game use active camouflage, and the effect really looks much cooler than the Predator-esque invisible man thing everyone else uses. It's more a slurry of colors as they move from place to place. Good stuff. But your camo isn't button-activated…it's contextual. The game turns it on when you're quiet, and switches it off when you go loud. And my team always went loud. Once that happened, I couldn't simply sneak off and leave my team to their fate while I re-cloaked and flanked the enemy. The game — and my teammates — locked me into their decisions, and that made it significantly less fun.
Don't get me wrong…I'm sure it's fine in single player, because bots know what they're doing more often than congenitally stupid people do. But I can't completely leave Ubisoft off the hook, either. They made a co-op game that ignores human nature, with mechanics that impose the lowest common denominator on the whole. In gaming, that's a cardinal sin.
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