Ghost Recon: Wildlands - 10 Things We Learned From The Beta

For the first time in the series' history, Ghost Recon is wild and free. But is it any good?

Ghost Recon Wildlands Cover
Ubisoft

Having experienced something of a critical drought at the turn of the decade, seven years on, it would appear as though the Clancy-verse is well and truly back to form. After two stellar releases in Splinter Cell: Blacklist and Rainbow Six: Siege, Ubisoft have now set their sites to Ghost Recon and, in true Ubisoft fashion, have gifted the series with a brand-spanking new open-world to play with; complete with complimentary backlash and that all too familiar cliche of online cynicism along with it.

However, having been lucky enough to get hands-on with the game in its most recent closed beta, I have to say that Wildlands is shaping up rather nicely.

It’s certainly a marked improvement over 2012’s Future Soldier (a game that threw the series’ non-linear roots well and truly out the window), and, despite its rather obvious flaws, reinstates the prospect of a fully-realised old-school Clancy title seeing the light of day sometime in the future. Which is pretty neat I reckon.

There’s no Scott Mitchell at the helm (sadly), but Wildlands gets a heck of a lot right for being such an ambitious release. However much it may falter out the window, here’s hoping it can keep its momentum going in the long run.

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and the Golden Age of Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled.