GAMER STATION

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Online (GRO) is a free to play 3D third-person, cover-based tactical shooter (MMOTPS) developed by Ubisoft Singapore, and offers all the best qualities of the Ghost Recon franchise in a downloadable, dynamic, PC-based online game. Ghost Recon Online offers players the ability to choose between three different classes of Ghost: Assault, Recon and Specialist. Each three dynamic character classes offer a broad array of tactical options on the battlefield. It's great that you can eventually deck out any class with the full range of guns and armament goodies you unlock from playing and amassing points for buying gear, but it's their special abilities that really make classes stand out. Far from a generic run-and-gunner, the assault class is perfect for pushing the front line into enemy territory. The blitz shield lets you charge forward at high speeds right into incoming fire, bludgeon enemies into a prone position, and then take them out with a few quick shots before they even know what happened. Or you can nuke foes with area-of-effect microwaves that blind them and cook them with radiation damag. Meanwhile, specialists can trigger EMP devices to short-circuit enemy tech or engage a limited portable force field bubble that affects bullet trajectories. Recon sniper units are favorites for their cloaking ability and a radar-like ping device that reveals enemy positions and invisible units to all teammates. Each unit's special perks are useful in countering another class's abilities too, which makes balancing your team important. Putting all of these skills into play on the battlefield at once is deliciously chaotic, and it keeps matches fluid and engaging.

And that’s one of GRO’s biggest problems. There’s technically nothing wrong with the design of all three class’ abilities as they are, and when you find a fairly balanced match, each class has plenty of chances to counter and complement the others’ abilities. Snipers clear the way for Assault soldiers, Assault soldiers charge in to clear the path forward, and Specialists provide protection and utility. But finding a truly balanced match is a rarity with GRO’s current matchmaking design, even with the option to change classes before a match begins. That’s because there aren’t any limits on how many of a certain class are in an arena, which means that it’s not uncommon to find yourself facing almost an entire team of Recon snipers. In one match, almost comically, I faced a group with six Assault players with our seven Recon, and the match quickly turned into a tragic buffalo hunt in which we picked off the Assault soldiers with few worries about our own safety. Spawn camping is thus a problem, even if it’s often situational, and the lack of any ability to change classes mid-game only exacerbates the problem. To Ubisoft’s credit, that’s still not as hopeless of a situation as it might seem, though, thanks to lengthy cooldown timers for special abilities that persist through death and prevent the matches from devolving into unmanageable chaos.

Besides that the interface, the menus, and the whole lobby system itself is beautifully done but in a shooter it all really comes down to how crisp and balanced the gameplay itself is. GRO forces you to take things slowly. Patience is a virtue, and luckily you’ll have built up plenty of it waiting out the queue. Run and gun gamers who think they can be godlike running wildly through the streets will be dropped in a hot flash and typically give away the rest of their team’s position in the process. Ghost Recon Online follow suite with its Buy to Play counterparts, encouraging sneaking, camping, and teamwork. Currently the most played game mode is conquest. Just like in any other game with the game mode conquest, you will have several capture points on the map to battle over with your allies. But remember, the game is played at a slow pace and thus capturing these points isn’t as easy as charging in and standing around in the open waiting on a timer. Since a lot of people camp, often lying in wait at a capture point for ten plus minutes, you will have to scout areas and force enemies out before having a chance to capture them. With the use of class skills like cloak or weapon jams you can try to force your enemy to fall back. Brute force doesn’t work well without the powerful class skills supporting them.

Ghost Recon Online is a lot of fun. I myself enjoyed playing it but there are enough hindrances for new players that I didn’t often feel encouraged to queue up for multiple matches in a row. Since the game isn’t that popular, new players should go in with the mindset that they’re going to get crushed quite a few times while slowly building up their character to hang with the veterans. Once you have bit the bullet and climbed the learning curve, with days of battle hardening matches under your belt, you will start to find yourself actually impacting the outcome of matches. This felt tedious at times as I rarely got to experience match modes outside of conquest. A shooter needs fast queue quick matches like Team Deathmatch to draw in a decent population by capturing the casual crowd. Perhaps I ask too much out of a Ghost Recon game, especially since the game supports camping with its many different stances and weapon possibilities, but sometimes the game was just too slow overall.

GAMEPLAY

 Official site : http://ghost-recon.ubi.com