Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon (2001 video game)

Gameplay

Ghost Recon puts the player in charge of the eponymous Ghosts, a fictional squad of United States Special Operations Forces soldiers from Delta Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Special Forces Group. They are organized into three fireteams named using the NATO phonetic alphabet: Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie, with space for three soldiers per team (the Xbox and PlayStation 2 versions do not have a Charlie team available). However, only six soldiers can be selected per mission. The player enjoys limited tactical control on the battlefield by issuing maneuver commands and rules of engagement for each fireteam through a command map.

The soldiers themselves are organized into four different character classes. Every class can carry a primary and secondary weapon, which are organized into "kits". Even though the primary weapon remains the same in all the kits (being defined by the soldier class — see below), there is a variety of equipment to be chosen as the secondary weapon.

For every completed mission in the single-player campaign, each soldier that survives gains one Combat Point to upgrade their attributes. There are four basic categories of skill:

The player also unlocks "specialists" from NATO or allied countries by completing extra mission objectives. The specialists are more experienced than the Ghosts and have more Combat Points, making them an essential part of the team. They are also equipped with weapons not available to standard soldiers. Two specialists are armed with the Objective Individual Combat Weapon, as part of field tests and implementation of the U.S. Army's Land Warrior program. The specialist corps includes three women, who are the only female combatants in the game.

The game is played entirely from the first-person perspective. A heads-up display relays information such as the name of the soldier the player is controlling, the soldier's assigned fireteam, weapon and ammo counter, a threat indicator, the targeting reticule, health status, and a stance indicator (to show whether the character is standing, crouched, or prone).

Bullets will not penetrate most objects, but they will break glass. Explosives or heavy gunfire can be used to destroy wooden doors, and (in the case of explosives) potentially kill anyone within the blast radius on the other side. Depending on a target's armor, it is generally possible to neutralize a threat with one or two well-placed shots.

If a soldier is rendered "out of action" during a mission, he or she is considered to be dead, and not available for the rest of the campaign. Wounded soldiers who survive a mission will remain wounded unless they are replaced with a healthy soldier for the next mission.

Ghost Recon has both single player and multiplayer modes of play. Up to 36 players are supported in the PC version's multiplayer over an internet (TCP/IP) connection or LAN.

Plot

An ultra-nationalist regime takes control of the Russian government in Moscow, installing its leader Dmitri Arbatov as president. Russia then takes control over Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, forming the Russian Democratic Union (RDU), a political and military alliance dedicated to recreating the former Soviet Union.

In April 2008, the U.S. Army's elite "Ghost" soldiers battle South Ossetian separatist rebels who are harassing the Georgian government and their allies. Their presence forces the RDU to complain to the United Nations that the U.S. has interfered in their internal affairs. The Russian army invades Georgia to assist the rebels. The Ghosts slow down the Russian advance while foreign civilians are evacuated from the country. Eventually, the Ghosts are all that's left of U.S. forces in Georgia and take the last helicopter out of the U.S. embassy in Tbilisi just as Russian forces arrive. The Georgian government sets up a government-in-exile in Geneva, Switzerland while the RDU annexes Georgia, an act publicly condemned by the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany.

The Ghosts are soon sent to the Baltic states in response to a Russian invasion launched three days ahead of NATO intelligence estimates. The Ghosts attempt to slow down the attack to buy time for NATO units to arrive in force, with the closest of them coming from Germany. The Ghosts fight alongside U.S. Army elements to push the Russians out of the Baltics, with victories in Rēzekne, Latvia, Utena, and Vilnius, Lithuania. The defeat takes its toll on the RDU government with President Arbatov largely blamed for the disaster and put under house arrest.

The Ghosts enter Russia with their first mission being to free U.S. POWs and Russian political prisoners opposed to the RDU. The Russian military executes President Arbatov, which sparks a nationwide rebellion bordering on civil war. The ultra-nationalists quickly lose public support and many members of the RDU government quit the alliance. The Ghosts later attack several Russian bases such as a naval base at Murmansk and an airbase at Arkhangel'sk, weakening the ultra-nationalists' combat power. The RDU attracts strong international condemnation and practically dissolve after they detonate a nuclear weapon during a battle north of Moscow between the ultranationalists and a joint force of U.S. and rebelling Russian combat units.

Acting Russian Prime Minister Karpin privately requests additional NATO aid in the fighting, prompting the entire 1st Armored Division to be sent over the Russian border. The Ghosts spearhead a NATO assault on Moscow by cutting through a strong ultranationalist defensive line in the woods outside the capital. On November 10, 2008, NATO forces finally reach a deserted Moscow, with the last ultra-nationalist defenders holed up inside the Kremlin. After a final assault by the Ghosts in Red Square, the ultra-nationalists surrender and both the Americans and the newly liberated Russians celebrate their victory.

Expansion packs and related games

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Desert Siege is a 2002 expansion pack, released for Microsoft Windows as a separate purchase and can be unlocked as a new campaign in the PS2 version of Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon. It is also bundled with the Mac port. The expansion pack adds 2 new multiplayer game types (Domination and Siege), 5 new multiplayer maps, new weapons for use in multiplayer, and an eight-mission single player campaign, which also unlocks a new specialist soldier (Jodit Haile). In the PS2 version, players who start Desert Siege by finishing the Ghost Recon campaign first will also retain the soldiers they used in the campaign, including their statistics.

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Island Thunder was released in late 2002 as an expansion pack for Microsoft Windows, and as a standalone game for Xbox. It contains eight new single player missions, 12 new weapons, 5 new dedicated multiplayer maps, 3 new multiplayer modes (Cat and Mouse, Defend, and Behemoth). On the Xbox, Island Thunder features five additional missions and twelve multiplayer maps.

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Island Thunder was never released for the PlayStation 2, but its content was combined with eight new single-player missions set in Colombia and additional multiplayer maps and released under the title Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Jungle Storm in 2004.

In addition to the official expansion packs, the very active Ghost Recon modding scene (over 1,000 mods have been published as of January 2013) has produced a large number of unofficial expansions packs for PC. Free expansions like Frostbite, CENTCOM, Heroes Unleashed, and Year of the Monkey (among others) have gained huge popularity, with download counts in the hundreds of thousands.

Critical reception

Reviews of the game ranged from positive to very mixed. GameRankings and Metacritic gave it a score of 85.35% and 84 out of 100 for the Xbox version; 82.15% and 80 out of 100 for the PC version; 67.03% and 63 out of 100 for the PlayStation 2 version; and 63.25% and 59 out of 100 for the GameCube version.

Awards

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon was named Best Game of the Year in 2001 by both IGN and PC Gamer, as well as receiving the Best Sound award from PC Gamer magazine. Ghost Recon was a runner-up in IGN's "Best Action Game 2001" and "Best Use Of Sound" ("Reader's Choice"). Wargamer gave it three bronze awards in "Game of the Year", awarded Red Storm with "Game Developer of the Year", and gave "Game Publisher of the Year" to Ubisoft.

Plot coincidence

In 2008 the Russia-Georgia war began, with a number of commentators noting on the coincidence, that this real world event, was somewhat similar to the plot of Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon.