Review: Ghost Recon: Commander – a free-to-play Facebook game – 2

By: Musa Afridi

  |   July 13th, 2012   |  

News, Uncategorized

With the basic mechanics nailed down it is now time to move on to the gameplay and player progression of Ubisoft’s first free-to-play title.

Player Progression

As with any Facebook game along the line of Zynga’s Farmville or Texas Hold’em Poker, there is player progression. Completing objectives and successfully ending missions brings with it Experience Points. In fact, killing an enemy soldier or even snakes and rats brings rewards players with XP as well.

As players earn more and more XP they level up and gain access to new content. This ranges from new characters that players can take on missions with them to new weapons and items in the shop, which still require purchase with either in-game currency or Facebook credits depending on each individual item itself.

At the same time, increasing one’s rank in the game by accumulating the required levels of XP also unlocks various structures, which increase the player’s stats in an almost RPG like fashion.

Gameplay

The gameplay itself is the layman’s definition of point and shoot or point and move. The player is placed in the map with his squad with a radar highlighting all the objectives and enemies on the map.

In order to move to a particular location the player has to simply click there and the squad moves to that location. The gameplay is basically turn-based however, it happens in real-time so unless anyone knew that the gameplay was turn-by-turn they would never have guessed. A strong point of the game.

Shooting follows the same mechanic as players simply point at the target and click to fire a single round and multiple clicks equal multiple shots. On average it can take anywhere between a single headshot to up to five shots to take down an enemy soldier, depending on how many shots hit and how many miss (Yes, players can actually miss if the player’s stats are low).

Objectives range from wiping out enemy soldiers, retrieving objectives and collecting intelligence, among other things. The completion of each objective, as mentioned earlier gives the player XP.

However, one will find themselves running low and even out of ammo during the missions and will find themselves standing around, sometimes right in front of a horde of enemy soldiers, waiting for his ammo to regenerate.

Also upon completing a mission a player is given a choice whether he wants to unlock content for Ghost Recon: Commander or content for the console and PC version of the game, Ghost Recon: Future Soldier.

The gameplay is simple enough and may get repetitive for some but different missions throw up quite a bit of variation despite major objectives remaining the same for the most part.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are the writer’s own and do not reflect the editorial policy of wishfree.com.