Ghost Recon | DJcube

SWIFT • SILENT • INVISIBLE

NA release: 11th February 2003
EU release: 20th March 2003
JP release: N/A
Developer: Red Storm Entertainment
Publisher: Ubisoft
NGC Magazine: 66%
Mods Used: Widescreen Hack

While The Sum of All Fears was built using the Ghost Recon game engine, it made it to GameCube before the actual Ghost Recon. Unfortunately, the real game still has many of the same issues that plagued the film tie-in, while also not being quite as utterly broken. You can actually move and strafe comfortably, for instance, which is a colossal improvement over The Sum of All Fears.

This is another tactical shooter which has been massively downgraded for the console audience, which pretty much includes removing major aspects and compensating for it in bizarre ways. The amount of teams you can command has been reduced, and your squad AI is so bad that you can’t really trust them on their own. Meanwhile, changes elsewhere mean that you can just ignore all of that anyway and just go through the missions alone.

The radar now points in the direction you need to go (although you at least need to figure out how to get around scenery) and enemies appear on it very early. Every single weapon also has a zoom function (unlike the PC version) which means you just walk forward until you see a red dot, aim and shoot. Your crosshair will light up even when all of the enemy is concealed behind a bush, and almost every enemy can be sorted out in this way.

If you have a friend, you can actually do some tactics in the co-op mode, with your friend doing the job that the CPU-controlled squamates can’t, but if you’re on your own, you’re stuck with squamates that wander in open areas and enemies that look the wrong way.

Poor

In short, Ghost Recon doesn’t feel like it’s seen much in the way of GameCube optimisation; the controls are a little fusty, lacking a decent sense of control in the sticks, and the map screen suffers from a similar fuzziness to the action itself. However, it’s of mostly sound construction, and largely enjoyable, if not the sweat-soaked attention hoover we hoped for. A more generous budget in the conversion department, and Ghost Recon would’ve been a saucy special-ops cracker of a game, As it stands, it’s perfectly adequate, and a generally better bet than week-night TV.
Al Bickham, NGC Magazine #79

Remake or remaster?

Perhaps spruce up the PC version.

Official Ways to get the game

The PC version of Ghost Recon is available on Steam.