Irish Exclusive : Ghost Recon Future Soldier Multiplayer Hands On.
Developer Ubisoft
Publisher Ubisoft
Platform Xbox360, PS3, PC
Release Date 25th May 2012
We were delighted to meet with Ubisoft and get the chance to play a bit of the excellent multiplayer mode in the upcoming and eagerly awaited tactical shooter Ghost Recon Future Soldier. Ghost Recon is easily one of the best shooting franchises ever made. The series emphasises realism, and although they Ghosts are equipped with some futuristic weapons these are all weapons that are at least at prototype stage in real life.
We got to test out one of the maps and one of the game modes and as you would expect it is incredibly solid. We had a tight time span to test out as much as we could so while we tested a lot it must be said there is a load we just didn’t get time to get near.
A quick overview, Ghost Recon is a third person tactical shooter (bar when aiming down the sights it turns into a FPS) with a huge focus on cover. The cover system is one of the best we have ever used, it is really easy to get in and out of cover. Moving from one point to the next is incredibly smooth but the cover isn’t a perfect hiding place. The cover protecting you disintegrates from the incoming gunfire, but my favourite feature is when you are being supressed. Rather than just having bullets flying around you it impacts on the player quite heavily causing huge vibrations in the camera and impacting heavily on the aiming system making it quite hard to return fire.
This might seem like a small feature but it really brings home that you are under fire from a heavy machine gun rather than just having
The teams are split into two equally balanced factions the Ghosts and the Bodar each of these is further split into 3 roles. The rifleman is equipped with assault rifles, light machine guns and are usually the guys on the front line doing the dirty work. The scout then is your sniper class, equipped of course with high powered long range rifles but also for getting up close soldiers have an SMG and to remain hidden they utilize the stealth cloak. The third class is the Engineers and these are the guys with the gadgets and possibly the most important in terms of team intelligence. For example they can deploy a radio controlled drone to fly over the battle field and highlight enemies on the HUD.
Intel is extremely important, each player has an option to take down a player without killing them such as using a shock gun and to then download their intel giving you the enemies positions for a short time. Overall there is over 13 different gadgets to get to grips with and for each gadget there is an opposing gadget. Using this correctly can deliver fake intel to the other team, what we noticed very quickly is how balanced ghost Recon is once you know what you are doing.
Overall our time was too short to get to grips with everything on offer. The amount of weapons and customisations available is endless and would have taken weeks to try them all as well as the weapons smith Kinect feature that allows players to use the device to switch out the different attachments. With news of the upcoming beta we hope to have more time to test even more features.
To say we are excited is an understatement our favourite series is bringing it’s A game to the table. Ghost Recon Future Soldier is out on the 25th of May 2012.
