Let's get it on

There are a variety of game play modes present in Ghost Recon. For single player there are campaign and quick mission. In campaign mode you go through each mission one by one in order. This is where you get to build your character skill points, and unlock "heroes" when you successfully complete the optional objectives for each mission. The campaign follows a storyline, with every mission building up to the climatic final mission where you retake Red Square.

Multiplayer consists of solo, team, and co-op modes.

For Solo there are three game types: Hamburger Hill, Last Man Standing, and Sharpshooter. Sharpshooter is essentially death match, with the player with the most kills winning. Last man standing is just that, the last man standing wins when time, or spawns run out. Hamburger hill is a little bit different in that the player who spends the most time in the central area of the map, denoted by a smoke plume, wins.

For Team, the three game types are Last Man Standing, Hamburger Hill, and Search and Rescue (SAR). LMS and HH are the same as in solo multiplayer. Search and rescue is a new game type where the two teams fight to retrieve 3 hostages placed on the map and return them to an extraction zone. As the hostages are invulnerable to weapons, some heavy firefights break out in the initial mad dash to grab the hostages.

Co-Op consists of Mission, Firefight, and Recon. Mission is just that, the mission from the campaign, except now you can complete it with your online buddies. Firefight is essentially "Tango Hunt." 30 tangos are dispersed through the map, and your team must hunt them down and kill them. This is a blast with infinite spawns. No more frustration killing 20 of them and your team dying.

While Red Storm and Ubi Soft have stated in the past that only 30 percent or so of their game purchasers play online, multiplayer is where it's at. This game is fun, no matter how you slice it; Ghost Recon has got a little bit for everyone. If you like run and gun mayhem, load up a 20 player solo sharpshooter game with infinite respawn and the arcade setting. Arcade speeds up player speeds and reduces damage, i.e. lets you play like a half-retarded monkey on crack (just my opinion) =).

My personal favorite multiplayer experience is Co-op firefights. One very noticeable difference between GR and the previous tactical shooters from RSE is the game length. Gone is the 45 second melee, it has been replaced by the 15 minute odyssey where you spend 12 minutes hunting for that dang sniper who keeps picking you off at 80 yards.

Respawn makes all the difference in the game. Set it to infinite and tactics fall by the wayside as everyone has no penalty for getting killed. Set it to none and it's the ultimate in stress (game wise at least) because if you do something stupid and get killed, you may have to wait upwards of 20 minutes to get into game again depending on the server settings.

As hosts develop a favorite style of play, look for a very wide variety in the respawn and game length settings. I suspect that the majority of the servers will run Team Last Man Standing.

Ghost Recon ships with a "dedicated" server option that supports up to 36 players. This isn't a dedicated server like you would see with a games like Tribes 2, but it is much more developed and robust than anything RSE has previouslyreleased. The dedicated server option is a command line flag "-autoserve" which you can attach to a shortcut to launch the game. Enabling remote access and giving out the admin password to a few hundred of your closest friends, allows everyone to take advantage of idle boxes they have on fat pipes. Hopefully, the server will be stable enough that we may actually see some servers collocated on very big pipes at ISPs =).

In terms of the amount of bandwidth needed to host GR, I can't estimate, but I can tell you that with the GR demo I hosted as many as 15 on my machine with a 384k upload without anyone complaining of lag. This was not with the dedicated client as it was not enabled in the demo. Take that number with a grain of salt folks, the only way to know for sure is to hangout on your server and find the right number based on peoples experiences.

It should be mentioned that the game includes the install files for the Ubi.com gaming service. This is the primary way players will match up and play GR online. I personally haven't tried it yet, mainly because only a few press outlets legally have the game at this time. Below is a screen of part of the interface. Interesting little blurb it gives you about NAT connections.

After more people have the game the Ghost Recon Retreat will revisit the Ubi.com gaming zone issue.

The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

The game is fairly solid, however I did have a few unexplained crashes while 3d Retreat staff was testing the game on a LAN. Other staff members had the occasional crash as well. These would vary from a simple CTD, to a full blown blue screen and reboot, all under Windows 2k Pro or XP Pro. Other members of the gaming community have complained about random crashes in the demo. Hopefully, if there is a wide scale problem, RSE will track it down and patch it quickly like they did the multiplayer bug that was present when RS shipped.

Other than the oddball annoying crashes, which may or may not be more my fault than RSE's, there aresome definite design decisions that were made that I don't care for. These are in a way personal opinion, however they were consensus among the 3d Retreat staff present at the testing session last week, and I have seen them expressed about the demo in the forums.

We can no longer set a default firing rate, thus every time you start a game, or spawn after dying, you have to change your ROF if you don't like single shot.

The multiplayer launch when everyone clicks ready is a nice feature, but we felt it would be better with a short 3-5 second pause or countdown. That way you never get cut off in mid sentence. In addition, it would be very helpful to be able to see who is ready and not just a number of 6/13 etc.

Two other multiplayer features we grew accustomed to in RS:UO have disappeared in GR. One is the ability to team chat while in the in game chat lobby waiting for game launch. Team chat was very useful for coordinating loadouts etc. The other is the host has somehow lost the ability to assign a player to a team color. If either of these features exist, I have missed them in my perusal of the interface and the 60 page manual.

There is no setting for always run. While lending itself to realism, it does tend to make your right mouse finger get tired if you are a run and gun player.

Ghost Recon is a great game. I am VERY impressed with the product I have before me. The graphics are great. Night vision is imperative for many of the missions, and it actually looks fairly realistic and doesn't seem like a "thrown together" effect. See the following screen to show the dangers lurking in the bushes that night vision can reveal for you.

The sound, OMG the sound!!! RSE has always done a very good job creating ambient moods to add to the realism level of their games through the use of good sound affects, and Ghost Recon simply takes the cake for the sound department. Whether it's the crinkly of leaves as you belly crawl through a bush, to the distant report of gunfire, to the deafening roar of a jet flying overhead the sound and EAX affects in Ghost Recon are worth the price of admission by themselves. The jets flying overhead are loud enough that it covers the report of your sniper rifle on mission two (free hint, and I didn't make you call the 900 number). You can get a brief taste of in game sound by listening to the audio in one of our game play videos if you haven't played the demo. The combination of water splashing sounds as you walk through the swamp, with your uniform being wet as you climb out is awesome. The whistling of the wind as you stand on a canyon ledge admiring the swaying trees is a first for me in terms of computer gaming. The atmosphere created by the combination of the graphics and sound is one I can say is unmatched in any other game I have played to date.

Another factor contributing to making Ghost Recon a well rounded package is the improved modding tool, IGOR, that ships on the Ghost Recon cd. With this tool you can very easily create new missions, weapons, and modify hundreds of options for the game. To learn more about this tool in detail, visit our IGOR info page here.

In conclusion, go buy Ghost Recon, you'll love it if you are a fan of the tactical fps.

Rating - I have no numerical values to give GR. Quite simply, it is my Game of the Year and has easily replaced Tribes 2 as my current game of choice.

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