Ghost Recon
One of the biggest hits on the PC finally arrives on the GameCube, more or less
Tags: Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Categories: Game Cube Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Jake McNeill on Jul 31st, 2003
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon (title page) | |||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Action | No | ||
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The PC version of Ghost Recon was released in 2001 to much acclaim, receiving numerous Game of the Year awards from various publications. Combining the strategic team-based combat of Tom Clancy’s other highly-acclaimed game series, Rainbow Six, with military-themed objectives and vast, open-air environments made Ghost Recon a critical and commercial success. But that was in 2001, and on the PC.
Zoom ahead to today and the PC title has already received two expansions, and has seen a relatively good Xbox port whose strong online play has made it one of the most popular Xbox Live games to be released. After this, releasing a GameCube port with none of these features seems a bit too little too late, and that’s only if this was a good port.
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The problems start with the controls. First-person shooters on consoles rarely seem to have adequate controls compared to the PC’s mouse and keyboard, and this fact is often made all the more clear when PC first-person shooters are ported to a console. Ghost Recon is no exception, and although game menus allow you to change control stick sensitivity, it never feels quite right, and couldn’t hope to attain anywhere near the precision a mouse and keyboard have.
But even within the limitations of a console controller, the game’s controls still have problems. Often times, their response is sluggish, and the layout isn’t particularly intuitive. The zoom button, for example, automatically zooms to maximum when pressed, and can only be reduced back down when used in conjunction with the right analog stick. In the middle of a firefight, having to make adjustments like these can cost you far too much precious time. Adding insult to injury, the game has three different controller layouts whose only difference is the function of three of the controller’s buttons (shoot, reload and change weapon).
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The gameplay itself has a number of problems as well. Namely, the AI is absolutely horrendous. When teammates decide they want to follow the commands you issue, they take a good couple seconds to actually start doing them, and seem to move in erratic spurts rather than quickly running to the new location. All this aggravation, and that’s only when they follow commands at all. Often, teammates will choose to outright ignore instructions, forcing you to manually switch to them and move them to wherever they need to be.
When left to their own devices, teammates can be remarkably stupid, following the level of aggression you set to the letter. This means that when instructed not to engage the enemy, they will stand in one place while under fire, rather than seeking cover, and when told to engage any enemies en route to a new location, they’ll stop moving and fire at anything in their path, even if it’s an enemy they have absolutely no means to fight, like a tank.
The sad truth is, enemy AI isn’t very good either, and most enemies stand in one spot and fire once they see you, rather than finding safe cover or trying to flank your position. Enemies don’t seem to get smarter at higher difficulty settings either, just more accurate.
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Furthermore, the GameCube version of the game doesn’t allow the player to control more than three teams and tells you exactly where enemies are situated with a radar and a cursor that changes color when it passes over an enemy, which makes the game less about strategy and more about who hits who first. This is made even more simple by the fact that one shot, any shot, kills. While enemies can occasionally take two or three hits to bring down one of your men, I’ve toppled numerous opponents with a single shot to the foot. In short, the term “Team-based strategy FPS” hardly seems accurate, since your teammates don’t act like a team and the element of strategy is shaky at best.
The game’s sound is decent when it’s there, with good voice narration and decent music. Unfortunately, the game runs in near-silence most of the time, waiting to play music until your team encounters enemies, which are sparsely distributed over a relatively large area. This means that 70-80% of the time you’re playing Ghost Recon, all you hear is the sound of your own footsteps.
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While the sound may be disappointing, the graphics are quite simply a joke. Character animation is about as jerky as they come, at times seeming to only consist of two or three frames of animation. In addition, framerates are absolutely horrendous, slowing to a crawl seemingly any time six or seven people are in the area (which in a team-based game is ridiculously often). Toss in a good amount of pop-up, and bland low-res textures, and at times you could swear this was an N64 game if you squint a little. And while the large environments are very nice, we’ve now seen dozens of games that successfully incorporate them without compromising the graphical quality of everything else.
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This isn’t an N64 game we’re talking about here, and it’s not even a Playstation 2 game. It’s a GameCube game, and the GameCube is capable of far, far more than this. Ubi Soft has shown that they know how to cater to the console market when they released Splinter Cell, one of the finest games to be released on any platform within the past year. Yet here we have a sloppy, bug-ridden port that would have been laughable on the last generation of hardware. All this, in a port of one of the most highly-acclaimed PC and Xbox games. How disappointing.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
| -At its core, this is still Ghost Recon, which was a damn good game | 6.0 |
| What Doesn't | |
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-The Gamecube version is lacking many of the features from the PC and XBox versions -The graphics are horrendous, and the sound is almost nonexistant -The controls are terrible -AI is a joke |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| This is a bad port of a good game. Two years late and in poor shape, the only real reason to buy the GameCube version of Ghost Recon is because there aren't really many good team-based FPSes on the platform to pick from. | |
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Tags: Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon
Posted by Jake McNeill on Jul 31st, 2003 and is filed under Game Cube Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
