In the world of video game shooters, the Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon franchise is one of the elder-statesmen of the genre; pioneering a focus on realistic hardware and present-day settings well before doing so became standard procedure for the industry. The series has been relatively quiet of late, but is now coming back in a big way with the newest installment, Wildlands, which will pit players’ covert-ops team against a brutal South American drug cartel in one of the most expansive settings yet seen in the franchise.
Now, new trailers and gameplay demos for the title have dropped at E3, offering a closer look at the hotly-anticipated new game.
In Wildlands, players will take command of a covert-operations team tasked with taking down the all-powerful Santa Blanca drug cartel in Bolivia, which in the game has become the capitol of international illegal narcotics supply and a “global threat;” leading the U.S. government to dispatch the lethal Ghosts team to bring down the cartel using tactical warfare. The setting marks a return to a contemporary world after a pair of installments (Future Soldier and Advanced Warfighter) took the series in a more science-fiction related direction.
The trailer features imagery and settings that feel calculated to remind players not only of the earlier Ghost Recon games, but also of popular recent films and TV series like Sicario and Narcos which have made the intricacies and mythos of the international drug trade a popular topic for dark contemporary fiction. The game’s introductory trailer showed off the methodical world of the Santa Blanca smuggling operations with narration by the story’s central villain, before revealing the Ghosts presence and the fact of this being a Ghost Recon game, while a subsequent trailer focused on cinematic action and the various forms of weaponry, vehicles and tactics available to complete your missions.
Also revealed in the same release slate was a gameplay demo of one of the game’s key missions, the takedown of “El Pozolero;” a vicious cartel executioner known for dissolving victims in barrels of acid. In the demo, the Ghost team works as a cohesive unit to infiltrate the area where Pozolero is being protected and neutralize the threat from within, with multiple avenues of completion and options being available to skilled players. Though its only a small slice of what promises to be a much bigger game, the demo should prove heartening to old-school fans who’d been angling for a return to Ghost Recon fundamentals after several off-model installments.
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands is scheduled for a release in March of 2017. Screen Rant will bring you more updates on this and other big games as they become available.
Source: Ubisoft
