econ21
05-09-2006, 15:51
Anyone here bought Ghost Recon 3? I picked it up at the weekend and am a little disappointed.
I quite liked the original Ghost Recon - it seemed realistic (usually one shot, one kill) and the SP campaign was long (15 big missions) and nicely varied. I hated some of the harder, timed missions but typically the missions were rather open and unscripted, giving you a lot of freedom to complete them your way. The downsides with the game were that it was very unforgiving and often you'd end up dead with a bullet coming from who knows where. Conversely, success was usually from spotting the enemy first and sniping them from far away. All rather clinical and uninvolving. While it maybe realistic, this led to save and reload gaming where you eventually learnt the location of the bad guys - this risks killing the immersion, the fun and indeed the realism. I don't generally play shooters, but on balance preferred Vietcong, where your character is a bit more robust (and has healthpacks) and combat is more up close n personal. More gamey, maybe, but more fun and arguably gives you a more authentic experience than reloading X times.
Anyway, back to GR3. It parachutes you into Mexico City and graphically is rather impressive graphically. It almost seems photo-realistic in appearance, reminding me of an episode of "24" in a washed out, dusty urban environment. The interface seems fine - similar to GR but now you just control the one character. You can get video feeds from the other 3 squad members, but as you can't control them, I don't really see the point. Video feed from the occasional spotter drone, by contrast, is very useful when you have it. One nice feature this time round is that you can see the barrel of your gun, which I always like, although as it is 2013, you have guns that I have never seen or heard of before, which disappoints the historian in me.
The early part of the game plays well, merging a tutorial with actual completion of a mission. But gradually, the game seems to get harder and harder, so that the "die/learn where the bad guys are/reload" trick gets more pronounced than in the original GR. What is worse, is that you can't save except at savepoints and there are usually around 10 bad guys between savepoints. So that is 10 saves and reloads for the inept players like me. Frustrating. Some of the constraints - heavy machine guns nests (more like cannon nests, in fact) and omniscient tanks - are particularly gruelling.
While the city seems enormous, I suspect the maps are actually rather small. For example, to take out a tank, I was told I could not try to get behind it ("moving out of the combat zone"). I could not shoot from its left ("obstructed"). I died repeatedly at the front or the right before I could even deploy my rocket. So in fact there seemed to be only one direction from which to kill it from a vantage point above. That was a let down from the open free-form nature of mission solutions to GR1.
Perhaps the worst feature of GR3 maybe the length. I am still stuck in Mexico City and thought maybe I was doing one, two or three missions of the length of GR1. Reading a walkthrough on Gamefaqs, it seems I might actually be 3/5 of the way through the game. So it looks like the game length is 1/3 of the original GR1. That's kind of disappointing. The missions just aren't fun or characterful enough to make such a short experience value for money, in my opinion.
If the game was as long as GR1, I'd recommend it as an 8/10 (or maybe 7/10). But if it reallly is as short as I fear, it's more a 6/10.
I quite liked the original Ghost Recon - it seemed realistic (usually one shot, one kill) and the SP campaign was long (15 big missions) and nicely varied. I hated some of the harder, timed missions but typically the missions were rather open and unscripted, giving you a lot of freedom to complete them your way. The downsides with the game were that it was very unforgiving and often you'd end up dead with a bullet coming from who knows where. Conversely, success was usually from spotting the enemy first and sniping them from far away. All rather clinical and uninvolving. While it maybe realistic, this led to save and reload gaming where you eventually learnt the location of the bad guys - this risks killing the immersion, the fun and indeed the realism. I don't generally play shooters, but on balance preferred Vietcong, where your character is a bit more robust (and has healthpacks) and combat is more up close n personal. More gamey, maybe, but more fun and arguably gives you a more authentic experience than reloading X times.
Anyway, back to GR3. It parachutes you into Mexico City and graphically is rather impressive graphically. It almost seems photo-realistic in appearance, reminding me of an episode of "24" in a washed out, dusty urban environment. The interface seems fine - similar to GR but now you just control the one character. You can get video feeds from the other 3 squad members, but as you can't control them, I don't really see the point. Video feed from the occasional spotter drone, by contrast, is very useful when you have it. One nice feature this time round is that you can see the barrel of your gun, which I always like, although as it is 2013, you have guns that I have never seen or heard of before, which disappoints the historian in me.
The early part of the game plays well, merging a tutorial with actual completion of a mission. But gradually, the game seems to get harder and harder, so that the "die/learn where the bad guys are/reload" trick gets more pronounced than in the original GR. What is worse, is that you can't save except at savepoints and there are usually around 10 bad guys between savepoints. So that is 10 saves and reloads for the inept players like me. Frustrating. Some of the constraints - heavy machine guns nests (more like cannon nests, in fact) and omniscient tanks - are particularly gruelling.
While the city seems enormous, I suspect the maps are actually rather small. For example, to take out a tank, I was told I could not try to get behind it ("moving out of the combat zone"). I could not shoot from its left ("obstructed"). I died repeatedly at the front or the right before I could even deploy my rocket. So in fact there seemed to be only one direction from which to kill it from a vantage point above. That was a let down from the open free-form nature of mission solutions to GR1.
Perhaps the worst feature of GR3 maybe the length. I am still stuck in Mexico City and thought maybe I was doing one, two or three missions of the length of GR1. Reading a walkthrough on Gamefaqs, it seems I might actually be 3/5 of the way through the game. So it looks like the game length is 1/3 of the original GR1. That's kind of disappointing. The missions just aren't fun or characterful enough to make such a short experience value for money, in my opinion.
If the game was as long as GR1, I'd recommend it as an 8/10 (or maybe 7/10). But if it reallly is as short as I fear, it's more a 6/10.