Ghost Recon Wildlands

Ghost Recon Wildlands is a sprawling open-world shooter that drops you into Bolivia as part of the U.S. Army’s fictional Ghost unit. The objective is straightforward but ambitious, dismantle the Santa Blanca Cartel through a flexible, player-driven campaign built around planning, scouting, and coordinated assaults.

Publisher: Ubisoft
Playerbase: Medium
Type: Shooter
Release Date: March 7, 2017
Pros: +Plenty of ways to get around the map. +Striking landscapes and varied regions. +Designed with 4-player co-op in mind.
Cons: -Does not always deliver the tight tactical feel the premise suggests.

Overview

Ghost Recon Wildlands Overview

Set in a fictionalized Bolivia, Ghost Recon Wildlands casts you as an operator in the elite Ghost unit, assigned to weaken and ultimately topple the Santa Blanca drug cartel. As the tenth entry in the Tom Clancy shooter line, it shifts the series into a broad open world where missions are less about following a single corridor and more about choosing your own entry point, timing, and tools.

Wildlands is built to be played as a four-person team, but it is also fully playable solo with three AI teammates you can direct. The structure encourages reconnaissance and improvisation: scout targets before committing, identify patrol routes, and decide whether you want a quiet infiltration, a coordinated breach, or a loud hit-and-run that turns into a chase across the countryside. Portable drones are central to this flow, letting you observe compounds, tag enemies, and plan an approach before the first shot is fired.

Movement across the map is a major part of the experience. You can drive with your squad, take to the air, or simply parachute into a plan that starts from above. Alongside the main campaign, there is also competitive PvP for players who want a more direct test of their aim and teamwork. The world is populated with NPCs that can react in unpredictable ways, creating moments where you end up helping someone, angering them, or using them to gain an advantage, depending on how you choose to operate.

Ghost Recon Wildlands Key Features:

  • Part of the Ghost Recon Series – carries the series forward by pairing its squad-based action with a large open-world format.
  • Various Ways of Travel – drive together, ride in fast and light, fly to a vantage point, or drop in from the air to begin an assault on your terms.
  • Play as Four – built around four-player squads, with open-ended missions that reward coordination and role coverage.
  • In-Depth Tactics – drones help teams recon, mark threats, and set up a cleaner plan before engaging.
  • Unscripted NPCs NPC behavior is designed to feel less staged, with interactions that can shift based on what you do and how you behave in towns and outposts.

Ghost Recon Wildlands Screenshots

Ghost Recon Wildlands Featured Video

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands: Top 4 Coolest Things In The E3 Demo | Ubisoft [NA]

Full Review

Ghost Recon Wildlands Review

Ghost Recon Wildlands is at its best when you treat it like a sandbox for coordinated problem-solving. The game consistently gives you a target, a location, and a handful of contextual clues, then steps back and lets you decide how to make the takedown happen. That freedom is the core appeal, and it is also where the experience can become uneven depending on how you approach it.

Open-world structure and mission flow

The campaign is broken into operations across different regions, with cartel infrastructure, compounds, and patrols spread across deserts, forests, mountains, and rural towns. Most objectives can be tackled from multiple angles, so you can recon from a distance, pick an entry route, disable alarms, and isolate key threats, or you can arrive fast, force the situation, and escape before reinforcements overwhelm you. The open world supports both styles, but it tends to reward patience, particularly when you are playing with a coordinated group.

Gunplay, stealth, and the “tactical” promise

Moment-to-moment shooting is competent and readable, with enough feedback to make firefights satisfying, especially in co-op. Stealth is functional and often effective, largely because the game provides strong information tools, chiefly the drone and enemy tagging. The limitation is that the deeper “tactical sim” feel is not always there. AI reactions and the broader combat cadence can push encounters toward predictable escalations, which can make careful plans feel less meaningful than they should, particularly when missions devolve into large, noisy engagements.

Squad play: where Wildlands shines

Four-player co-op is the clear highlight. With friends, the game becomes a series of small, self-made set pieces: synchronized shots on a rooftop line, one player piloting while others cover from a vehicle, or a coordinated breach that goes wrong and turns into a frantic extraction. Communication elevates nearly every system, from scouting to timing pushes to managing escapes. Solo play is still viable, but it lacks the same energy and creativity that comes from human teammates improvising together.

Traversal and pacing

Bolivia’s scale is a major part of the game’s identity. The variety of vehicles, combined with air travel and parachuting, helps keep long distances from becoming a chore, and it supports creative insertions into hostile zones. That said, the open-world pacing can feel repetitive over long sessions if you focus on similar objective types back-to-back. The best way to keep it fresh is to vary your approach, switch regions, and mix stealth-heavy runs with faster assaults.

PvP and longevity

The competitive mode offers an alternative to the campaign’s sandbox rhythm, focusing more on direct player-versus-player tension. For many players, however, longevity is primarily tied to co-op experimentation: replaying missions with different plans, optimizing stealth routes, or simply enjoying the chaos that emerges when a clean op turns into a running fight.

Overall, Ghost Recon Wildlands is a strong co-op open-world shooter with a flexible mission framework and an impressive setting. Players looking for strict, high-fidelity tactical simulation may find the systems lighter than expected, but squads that enjoy planning, scouting, and executing their own strategies will get the most out of it.

System Requirements

Ghost Recon Wildlands System Requirements

Minimum Requirements:

Operating System: Windows 7 64-bit
CPU: Core i5-680 3.6GHz
Video Card: GeForce GTX 750 Ti or Radeon HD 6950
RAM: 6 GB
Hard Disk Space: 50 GB

Recommended Requirements:

Operating System: Windows 10 64-bit
CPU: Core i5-2300 2.8GHz
Video Card: GeForce GTX 960 | Radeon R9 390 or RX 480
RAM: 8 GB
Hard Disk Space: 50 GB

Music

Ghost Recon Wildlands Music & Soundtrack

Wildlands leans on a grounded audio presentation, with regional ambience, vehicle noise, and weapon reports doing much of the work to sell the setting. The soundtrack generally supports the on-mission mood rather than trying to dominate it, keeping the focus on reconnaissance tension and the sudden spike of action when a plan breaks down.

Additional Info

Ghost Recon Wildlands Additional Information

Developer(s): Ubisoft Paris
Publisher(s): Ubisoft

Game Engine: Custom in-house

Platform(s): PC, Xbox One, PS4

Full Release Date: March 07, 2017

Development History / Background:

Ghost Recon Wildlands is an open-world shooter developed by Ubisoft Paris and published by Ubisoft. It is the first Ghost Recon entry built around an open-world setting rather than a more linear mission structure. The game was first shown at E3 2015 and later launched in March 2017 for PC, Xbox One, and PS4.