Somehow, Ubisoft has managed to make a free game feel expensive. At the centre of Ghost Recon Phantoms is a competent military team shooter which cleverly subverts its stolid cover tactics with overpowering bursts of exotic, futuristic powers. It's light on content, rough in places, and imperfectly balanced - but the ebb and flow of its action is unusually thoughtful and occasionally thrilling.
Unfortunately, that well-considered core has been rolled around in the muck of micro-transactions which feel at best miserly and at worst predatory, before being delivered to the player in a malfunctioning software package which flouts some of the basic conventions for how respectable programs should behave.
Rating it on the exchange of bullets alone, however, it's a modest but enjoyable thing - a slight offering with only four maps, two game modes and three classes, each being a persistent upgradeable avatar. It's quite possible that this base level of free content will expand, but in a game which charges you for every grenade, you wouldn't want to bet on Ubisoft's generosity.
Guns level with you, giving you a better chance to crit.
The two modes are similar: one divides the two teams into attackers and defenders, the other is a more-or-less symmetrical tug-of-war, but both involve capturing objectives in sequence. In the attack/defend mode, called Onslaught, the game begins with two objectives, captured simply by occupying the glowing floorspace around a marker for a number of seconds. Once one is captured, the defenders can no longer reclaim it. When both are captured, the defenders fall back to protect a third and final position. The other game mode, Conquest, sees the two teams tussle back and forth over a string of five objectives, with the team which owns the most ground declaring victory when the timer runs out.
None of this will feel alien to players of Battlefield 3, although the levels here are far more confined, designed to accommodate a much more intimate and tactical style of play. Movement is relatively slow, and changes of stance, vaulting or mantling have a languorous pace that encourages you to be very deliberate in your actions. Each environment has been cannily designed with enough approaches to stretch a team's sightlines to the limit, but with the lethality of the weapons giving dug-in defenders a distinct advantage.
What breaks the deadlock are the classes' special powers. Each has two, but only one can be equipped at any time, and they are every bit as dramatic and game-changing as the Medic's Ubercharge in Team Fortress 2 - a peculiar but welcome excess in the otherwise kevlar-flavoured military fantasy of the Clancyverse.
The recon class, which packs sniper rifles or SMGs, can turn fully invisible for a fair number of seconds - plenty of time to skip past enemy lines and line up shots on their backs. One antidote to this is the recon soldier's alternative power, Oracle: a radar ping which highlights enemy silhouettes, whether they are cloaked or not, and which is visible to the whole team.
Some levels require you to push enemies out of sniping range before you can even capture the objective.
The specialist class, wielding bi-pod friendly LMGs or shotguns, can emit a bullet-deflecting aura or zap enemy electronics with an area-of-effect blast that sends opposing player's screens fitzing. Meanwhile, kitted out with either rifles or shotguns, the assault class can briefly charge the enemy at super-speed, an exoskeleton turning his usual run animation into a comical scamper worthy of Benny Hill while barging enemies aside with a riot shield. Or there's the other choice: a heat weapon that paints the environment in front with debilitating microwaves, rendering enemies blind and unable to fire.
Though some powers can be used to defuse others, the idea isn't so much to create a system of measures and countermeasures as it is to create a surging back and forth between temporarily overpowered teams. When it works, it creates some exhilarating battles, with assault troops smashing through encamped enemy positions while recon troops uncloak in the wings and specialists advance onto the cap with the rest of the team sheltering in their impenetrable aegis. But it is rarely all-out chaos: cooldowns for these powers are long, and persist between spawns, forcing you to deploy them with consideration and coordination.
Of course, consideration and coordination are not necessarily things your team-mates possess - and you can only ever choose to join a game with three friends, leaving half of your eight-man team's tactical nouse to chance. There is no server browser as yet, and no private matches, so your only option is the pot luck of matchmaking.
Although the players will presumably get more expert the longer the game is in the wild, I suspect that the design cultivates behaviour which goes against the objectives of each round. It has, in the idiom of Battlefield 3's community, a Wookie problem. In that game, snipers were outfitted in Ghillie suits resembling Star Wars' fursome friends, and a much lamented portion of players seemed content to lie prone, stoically observing an empty skyline, while the level's actual objectives lay some distance in another direction.
You can buy hats, but none of them are very funny.
This problem is exacerbated with Ghost Recon, as its sniper class is one of only three available, can't be switched during a game, and isn't terribly malleable. Your close-range alternative to a sniper rifle is a piffling SMG, near useless until upgraded. Naturally, recon soldiers are inclined to sit back at a range which benefits their kill/death ratio - and yet this is entirely the wrong thing to do in Conquest. Eventually, when the recon class unlocks invisibility and enough kit to make their SMG fire slightly more lethal than a heavy fart, it becomes a key tool in circumventing enemy lines. Which brings us to the game's micro-transactions.
I've made purchases in a number of free-to-play games now, and it's always been reasonably clear what I was buying. I put down a fiver for a heavy bolt launcher in the terrific Tribes Ascend and I don't regret it at all: it opened up an entirely different play-style for me. This is not the case in Ghost Recon. You aren't exploring alternative tactical routes, you are simply making yourself less awful at the routes available to you from the start.
All in all, the game is definitely worth playing. Check it out! - review from steam
Video Gameplay Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Phantoms - EU
System requirements Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Phantoms
Minimum:
OS: Windows Vista SP2, Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8/8.1 (32/64 bit versions)
Processor: Intel Pentium Dual-Core E2140 @ 1.6 GHz or AMD Athlon64 X2 3800+ @ 2.0 GHz
Memory: 3 GB RAM
Graphics: nVidia GeForce 8600 GT or AMD Radeon HD2600 XT (256MB VRAM with Shader Model 4.0 or higher)
DirectX: Version 9.0c
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Hard Drive: 6 GB available space
Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c compliant sound card
Additional Notes: Requires Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and Internet Explorer 9 (Windows Vista/Windows 7)
Recommanded:
OS: Windows Vista SP2, Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8/8.1 (64bit)
Processor: Intel Core2 Duo E6850 @ 3.0 Ghz or AMD Phenom II X2 545 @ 3.0 Ghz or higher
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: nVidia GeForce GTX260 or AMD Radeon HD4870 (512MB VRAM with Shader Model 4.0 or higher)
DirectX: Version 9.0c
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Hard Drive: 6 MB available space
Sound Card: 5.1 sound card
Additional Notes: Requires Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and Internet Explorer 9 (Windows Vista/Windows 7)
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