Ghost Recon: Breakpoint

 Ghost Recon: Breakpoint is just fine as a third-person tactical shooter.

You've got a big environment with lots of different locations, though only a limited variety of enemies and ways they can be set up. Shooting feels alright whether sniping stealthily or in a firefight. The game looks pretty good, even if environments are reused in some cases. All that is okay.

The really impressive part to me is the game options. There are a lot of things you can turn on and off from color-blind modes to various HUD/UI elements. You can even switch between a normal mode that has levels and rarities of gear drops and enemies or an "immersive" mode where you can swap attachments but a gun of type X is the same whether you just picked one up or loaded it at base. You can adjust your available health supplies and frequency of injuries. You can play multiplayer or have a squad of three AI teammates (the biggest benefit of which is some automatic enemy spotting and sync shots).

But... I know this is not the Ghost Recon: Breakpoint that was released initially.

When the game came out, most of those wonderful options didn't exist. AI teammates, while existing in Wildlands, were added later. The immersive mode was added later. A lot of the customization was added later. RNG-based loot rarity was the only way to play when the game was released a year and a half ago. This is largely why I didn't buy it at the time. I enjoyed Wildlands for what it was, and was warned away by the serious shift in gameplay for Breakpoint.

And even now that it has undergone so much more development and improved by adding so many options, I still consider it "okay" or "fine" - maybe 6 out of 10? It scratches an itch for a certain sort of game (arguably more than one sort now with all the options) in a competent way without really blowing my socks off in any sense.

Still, that's not the entire story. Breakpoint also shows glimpses of a completely different game. The initial reveal and some of the mechanics (injuries, item crafting, and consumables) show there was a vision of a much more survival-oriented game. It's there in the plot too - your several helicopters of special forces soldiers are taken down over an occupied island and you have to locate survivors, find allies, and press on with the mission. That sort of story would be better told in a more tightly-focused, intimate game (MGS 3: Snake Eater comes to mind as similar). Instead, it's dropped into an open-world mold to the detriment of that atmosphere.

You quickly find a safe hub that removes any sense of isolation and tension. Travel options that are practically required, but erode the sense of being behind enemy lines. The various outposts and bases aren't technically the same, but they can't mix things up very much and thus feel pretty repetitive. Basically, after the initial mission, the game loses any sense of harsh survival.

Ghost Recon: Breakpoint feels like a good example of how trend-chasing in the industry can muddle game development. People behind the game clearly wanted it to be several things at once, but ended up doing none of them well. A year and a half after release it does a couple of them decently, but it still doesn't really excel at anything.