Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars

Genre: Top-Down Turn-Based Strategy-RPG

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Alternating)

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Review:

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars, released on Nintendo 3DS alongside it at launch in 2011, is an XCOM-style Top-Down Turn-Based Strategy-RPG. This may seem perplexing to anyone who follows the Ghost Recon franchise as those games tend to be team-based First-Person Shooters, and as far as I can tell this game doesn’t include any plot connections to the main franchise, and only has some very loose thematic similarities. In other words, Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars is probably best seen as its own thing.

The presentation here is okay, but nowhere near as impressive as you would expect given the Tom Clancy licensing. The game features 3D visuals for its characters and locations, but they are extremely simple and poorly-detailed, and players can’t even do much to control the camera, only briefly swiveling it around before it snaps back to the default overhead view. The action is interspersed with story scenes featuring somewhat cartoony 2D artwork for the speaking characters. Not exactly a cinematic experience here.

At the very least, the game’s sound is decent, with all of the game’s speech being voiced, and with the music ranging from typical “spy espionage” sorta’ instrumental pieces to more militaristic actiony instrumental music, depending on the mood the game is going for. It would help to deliver the sort of cinematic feeling the sound hopes to make (perhaps compensating for the lacking visuals), except the story is just so amateurish and generic it’s hard to take seriously.

At the very least, the Strategy-RPG gameplay here is solid, if somewhat simple. Like you have in XCOM games, players’ attacks are based on line-of-sight and cover, with players trying to position their units ideally based on the layout of the battlefield. The mechanics of combat work well enough, but the RPG elements here are extremely limited – you don’t do anything to control individual characters’ progression, and can only decide which units to award stars to after a mission to improve their stats.

Despite its simplicity, Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars is still an enjoyable strategic experience. Positioning your forces to overwhelm enemies is satisfying, and these core mechanics work well enough. It’s just unfortunate that the presentation here is so underwhelming, and that the game does little to expand on these core mechanics, in particular in its lacking RPG elements. Still, if you’re a fan of Turn-Based Strategy-RPGs, you may find Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars to be enjoyable despite its shortcomings.

tl;dr – Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars is a Top-Down Turn-Based Strategy-RPG similar to the XCOM franchise. The core mechanics here work well enough, but the gameplay is overly simple and the presentation is underwhelming. Fans of Strategy-RPGs may get some enjoyment out of this, but it’s too simplistic to be a truly memorable entry in its genre.

Grade: C+

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