2019. Remember that year? Brexit dominated UK politics. The Boeing 737 Max was grounded. The Notre-Dame Cathedral was cindered. And Avengers: Endgame became the highest-grossing film of all time. You know what else happened in 2019? Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Breakpoint.
Check out the audio version on Spotify or Apple, or cruise into the YouTube version:
If you’re anything like me, you’ll remember Breakpoint’s reception more than the game itself. It seems people weren’t down with changes to its predecessor Wildlands’ successful model. Breakpoint got microtransactions to skip the line, tiered weapon upgrades, and a sort of gear-score/level mixtape for gating content. It was like watching your Wildlands kid graduate from college, only for its younger Breakpoint sibling to drop out and join a band as a drummer after getting a head injury. But what if I told you that beneath the launch-day noise, there was an actual game worth playing? What if, in 2025, Breakpoint… broke even?
The Core Gameplay Loop: Customisation and the World
Breakpoint’s basic story is that you’re Nomad, a killer of killers—the right soldier for a hard task. You and your team are dispatched to the fictional South Pacific island of Auroa. Skell Technology is headquartered there, a sort of dream tech company that attracts the best and brightest to work on cool shit in the middle of a tropical paradise. However (and spoilers), it’s not a top vacation spot anymore: between your rough landing, encounters with murder-bots of various sizes, and a fair-sized hostile military presence, you need to work out what’s going on and kill your way to the top of the food chain. Who’s behind it all? Is Jace Skell the bad man, or is your old buddy Walker the Butcher of Auroa? Are those shady-looking dudes CIA, or something else? And what about the insurgents infesting the island?
It’s a lot to take in, but don’t panic.
Where Breakpoint shines is in its embrace of player freedom and its cousin-loving marriage into customisation. There is a wide range of killing irons you can use, not just in their meta-types like SMGs, shotguns, or sniper rifles, but in their subtypes. If you want your DMR to be a full-auto weapon, you can live that dream. The combination of this with the game’s Gunsmith menu means you can tune and tweak the game to be the murder simulator you crave. My go-to loadout ended up being a DMR with either burst or autofire modes, coupled with a digital sight that could switch between 1x and 4x zoom. My secondary weapon was a grenade launcher, because sometimes that kind of conversation is needed. My sidearm preference tended toward a mid-calibre weapon with an extended magazine. But before landing on this soupçon of psychopathy, I also had great fun equipping a shotgun and going full brute squad, and found assault rifles quite a fun ride for medium-distance encounters.
It’s this variability that expands how people can approach Breakpoint. It also provides some great team choices for multiplayer, allowing a kitted-out squad to go John Rambo, Chris Kyle, or anything in between. Your AI NPC teammates also ensure a smooth ride if you’re like me and friendless. I spent my time with the game almost 100% as a solo player.
Let’s talk about that open world. The map is stuffed with icons, which is either going to excite you or be wearisome. One of my preferred ways to tackle the island is to strip the HUD back and just go exploring. It invites discovery. I’m a corner-checker by nature; I like finding the underground caves, survivalist caches, old war bunkers, and prepper cabins in the woods. Going off the beaten path ensures encounters with all of these. Auroa is more than a collection of icons; it’s an island that different types of people call (and called) home. Ruins exist alongside modern cities. It’s tricky to see anyone being bored of what it’s got to offer if the moment-to-moment gunplay works for you.
It’s not all bushwhacking. Dotted throughout the map are bivouacs which allow fast travel, switching class, spawning a vehicle, and changing the time of day. Want to craft a meal to tweak your stats? Feel like building a new weapon? This is where that action is at. However, a wise man once said that you only need fast travel if you make ordinary travel boring, and ordinary travel isn’t tedious in Breakpoint. It says something about Ubisoft’s world design that I preferred making my way overland or by helicopter to warp-gating through the bivouac system. The opportunities to get into a little ready trouble are too enticing to pass up; the open world is inviting enough that just walking across it to discover ruins, facilities, and roaming enemies remained engaging 90% of the time.
The Story, Missions, and Characters
The game puts you in the shoes of Ghosts, a tactical elite group of soldiers who were dispatched to interrupt events on Auroa, but get pummelled on entry. The story follows you as Nomad, the leader of a squad who needs to uncover what’s going on and avenge the fallen. The story itself is fairly paint-by-numbers, but how it’s told isn’t. There are two stand-out elements to this:
a) Jon Bernthal and
b) the pick-a-path model of mission design.
Bernthal’s a great actor, bringing vibrancy and brutish physicality to his roles, be they The Punisher or The Accountant. As an antagonist, he’s a convincing one—a man who’s served Uncle Sam and his dark hound, the CIA, for years—until he felt that too many good soldiers died for bad causes. The nuance in Walker’s character is that your Nomad really gets it. You know Walker from before—served together, fought in the trenches side-by-side, and had each other’s back. It’s difficult not to see the frustrations we expect veterans to voice embodied in Walker: soldiers who give their blood in service while the powerful squander people’s freedoms on their petty causes. Walker allies with devils because he’s a devil, but a devil with a purpose: he wants to upend the current cart of privilege and power. We can sympathise with him at the same time as abhorring his methods. This is helped along by the performance capture of Bernthal’s physicality in Walker’s scenes. It makes it clear they chose the right actor for the job.
The pick-a-path model was initially concerning; I thought there was no way they could stick the landing here. The basic thrust is that, once you find your feet, you get the opportunity to tackle Auroa any way you want. You can beeline the main objective, embrace the side mission lifestyle, or go full faction support. And the initial opening of the mission board is startling, especially if you have the DLC, as you’ll get three episodic start points. However, setting that to Episode 1 fixes the pain and starts you on a story where the writers have done a great job of combining discrete vignettes into an overarching narrative that allows you to save the world the way you want.
It is, at its heart, a blend of gameplay with story.
There are some great mission designs and a lot of variability to them: save the enemy deserter, broadcast pirate radio across the island, recon outposts, and generally be a huge pain in the ass to the occupying enemy force. There are specific moments all around the world where you feel like a person on the right side of justice. You might come across a technician being interrogated by the enemy. Your natural inclination is to execute the bad guys, and so you should—never suffer a bully to live. The game’s not shy about promoting the counter-military you’re opposing as an evil PMC, and whether it’s saving scientists or homesteaders, there are frequent moments where you can make a mark on a besieged civilian population against modern-day monsters.
For example, one side mission has you rescue a researcher who’s been doing a little work for the resistance on the side. Her gig is to step up to the plate, to take a more active role in the resistance, and as a part of that, she deliberately puts herself in the crosshairs by broadcasting a resistance message on Radio Freedom. This comes with the burden of you having to protect her while she carries out her mission, but that’s not the interesting part. See, she can never go home again after this moment; it’s a decision she made to do the right thing, and in your actions, you’re sharing the same moral compass for a moment. It would have been far easier for each mission to be, “kill ten guys,” or, “blow up that boat,” but Ubisoft instead chose to integrate deeper messages. Even these side missions have a strong sense of purpose attached to them.
Of course, not every mission is a hit! There was a live event crossover with Rainbow Six where it basically undid the whole point of Ghost Recon. Each crossover mission had an enforced timer by way of a gas mask; this fundamentally removes the tactical and stealth essence of Ghost games, focusing on artificial urgency. These missions provided frustration instead of sparking joy. And some supporting characters are a miss, like the homesteader whose personality is set on ’asshole’ for a good 80% of the game.
But the game preserves Wildlands’ feeling of cruising about with your posse. Your hero Nomad and your AI teammates are customisable. By default, your avatar is male-coded, but the voice work, whether you choose male or female Nomad, is perfection. Your squad are similarly well done; they can be dudebros, the girl strike squad, or whatever mix you prefer. Each teammate fills a role—for example, Fixit has a drone, and Vasily is a sniper. They’re a recon group, a true team, and they’ll fan out to support your position, all while pointing out dangers to you. While they definitely don’t play the game for you, they do contribute to the game’s story—that sense that Nomad’s on a team with other heroes who want to save the people of Auroa. Their presence makes you feel less alone, and that’s hardly a bad thing in a game world that’s constantly trying to murder you. Though, yes: sometimes your AI teammates are dumb as a box of bricks, and it feels like the only times I actually died in this game were because my squad was taking a piss by a tree or something similar instead of shooting the enemy.
The Technicals and Aesthetics
Art direction remains a strong point in this game from 2019; it still looks good in 2025 and plays better. Ubisoft’s focus on ‘looking good’ first struck me way back with the first Assassin’s Creed. They continue the same design work in Breakpoint: while there are games that push higher poly counts or involve advanced ray tracing technologies, the effective use of light and shadow, costumes, and up-close details make this game delicious to look at.
They prove their expertise in rendering sand from Assassin’s Creed isn’t their only trick; the game features forests, beaches, and white-capped mountains, each with elements that imbue the experience with a lived-in feel. Snow clings to your boots, and if you go prone camo, mud coats everything, including you and your weapon. Wind whispers through the grasses, and trees obscure the horizon rather than having pop-in effects that startle you if you get too close. Enemies are distinctive, and vehicle profiles are easily identifiable from a distance, allowing true tactical scenario-based play. It’s more than how good it looks; it’s a fuller package, using visual design to celebrate the gameplay and taking it to a higher level.
It’s worth leaning on how the artistry comes through, despite me not rocking a $6,000 GPU. It also avoids the frame-time stutters of poorly optimised games with shader compilation issues, and yes, Borderlands 4, I’m looking at you. Breakpoint provided me a rock-solid, silky-smooth experience on an AMD Ryzen 7700X with 32GB RAM and an nVidia 4070 Super. This mid-spec PC provides S-tier game performance, with seamless open-world roaming only interrupted by the odd narrative movie or teleport-to-bivouac fast travel moments.
Room-Sized Elephants: RPGification and Monetisation
The first Ghost Recon game I played was Advanced Warfighter on the 360, and man, I can tell you, times have changed. While it’s tempting to be the old man shouting at clouds, there’s both good and bad in the box of change, but vocal launch adopters of Breakpoint found the inclusion of an RPG into their tactical shooter was an unwelcome addition. For some, the ability to shoot a man in the head and for that man to respond realistically—by, say, falling down dead—was a bedrock element of the Ghost Recon tactical shooter experience.
See, Breakpoint embraced a sort of tiered weapon system. Map markers will warn you away from fire that burns if the game feels you’re still needing a little more time with your training wheels on. But crucially, this isn’t The Division 2, where you can dump 34 magazines into a boss and they’ll walk it off. Here in Breakpoint, it’s more of a gate to warn you away from drowning in the deep end. It’s a potentially uncomfortable mechanic, but it allows the freedom the open-world story system provides. Still, we need to acknowledge Breakpoint’s addiction to gear score: if your numbers aren’t big enough, enemies will peel you like a grape. But once you match them, you are back in one-shot kill territory (and arguably, if your skill level is higher than mine, you could ignore the numbers and take a chance, hero). It’s not the bullet-sponge dystopia I feared, but it is a mild brake that stops you from completing the main campaign too quickly.
This gives us an approach somewhere in the middle between the historical, raw tactical shooters of Ghost Recon’sancestors and full-blown looter-shooter RPGs like Borderlands. The TL;DR here is that the gamer who’s frustrated with the bullet-sponge nature of The Division 2 but enjoying its RPG-lite progression will probably find a happy home in Breakpoint. There’s even better news, because Ubisoft actually listened to the purists. You can turn on the game’s optional Ghost Experience mode, where it’s far more visceral and deliberate in its pacing and difficulty. This is, perhaps, Ubisoft’s recognition of what made the previous Ghost games such a cultural touchstone. With Breakpoint, there’s now a way to return yourself to glory through a mode patched in after launch… Or, you can have the numbers-go-up default experience.
Where I get a little more wound around the axle is Ubisoft’s always-online component and microtransaction culture. A single-player game that’s always online is an unnecessary foible foisted on gamers. CEO Yves Guillemot said the goal with Far Cry is to push multiplayer “more predominantly” in future entries, and we fear that with Ghost Recon’s future. We’ve also heard their director of subscriptions saying gamers need to get comfortable with not owning games, which I think we can agree is a remarkably self-serving statement from a guy who’s supposed to push a non-ownership business model. There’s evidence that Ubisoft has been angling for this future since they shipped Breakpoint.
While the monetisation and its trappings exist for shareholder value rather than the gamer, it’s not a spectre that burdened me in my 50+ hours with the game. I had one server maintenance outage, but that was it. The in-game monetisation menus are not very in your face. Unless you’ve got poor impulse control, this isn’t the kind of thing that’s going to constantly impede the Breakpoint experience. If you can park the static and embrace the signal, there’s good stuff to like in this package.
A Testament to Evolution
The major sticking point for some people will be whether they can embrace change in a beloved franchise. Breakpoint asks you to accept that Ghost Recon can be more than one thing—delivering a pure tactical shooter for purists through Ghost Experience mode, or an RPG-lite playground for those who want progression systems alongside their stealth kills.
That flexibility might be Breakpoint’s greatest achievement. In 2019, and without Ghost Experience mode, it felt like compromise. In 2025, it feels like maturity—a game confident enough to offer multiple experiences within one package. Sometimes evolution means addition, not subtraction. I liked Breakpoint because of this testament to how a game can evolve and how an initial impression isn’t always the full story. It’s a game that offers choice—from how you play through to its deep weapon customisation and its inviting open world. It gives you a compelling antagonist, impactful side missions, and a world that feels both fantastical and grounded. Yes, it has its jank, its questionable monetisation choices, and its one or two head-scratching missions. But it also has a lush playground to explore, cool characters, and avoids the bullet-sponge hell of The Division 2.
Maybe you don’t love that always-online component or a store designed to sell boosters and other trash. These facets still exist in the Breakpoint of 2025, but there’s nuance here. There’s a solid story alongside great antagonists. There are heroes on both sides of the conflict and people trying to live in a war zone. Here’s my recommendation: if you wrote off Breakpoint at launch, maybe it’s time for a second look. The game that exists today, patched and refined, might surprise you. The best Ghost Recon game isn’t necessarily the one that never changes—it’s the one that remembers what made the series dope as hell while finding new ways to deliver that tactical murder-hobo satisfaction. If you can embrace the freedom it offers, you might just find a really rewarding shooter in Ghost Recon: Breakpoint.
What did you think of Ghost Recon: Breakpoint? Let me know in the comments below. If you’re on team DMR, click Like. And if your favourite problem-solver…
