I remember the first time I played Ghost Recon Wildlands.
It was the spring of 2017. I was twenty-two, standing on the edge of adulthood, searching for something vast enough to get lost in.
A friend had been talking about it for weeks, and one evening, almost on a whim, I bought the disc.
But it wasn’t just a game.
It was a map to another world.
It was Wildlands.

I installed it, turned on the console, and Bolivia stretched out before me — endless mountains, dusty villages, rivers glinting under the burning sun.
I spent that whole night learning to move slowly again, to scout, to plan, to breathe before pulling the trigger.
The stealth, the firefights, the moments of pure silence broken only by the wind — it wrapped around me like a second skin.
I wasn’t playing it.
I was living it.

Then came dozens of missions, late-night raids, and quiet helicopter rides over sleeping valleys.
I learned every province, every cartel leader’s stronghold, every path over the hills.
And without any guide — just a map, a marker, and a stubborn will — I built my story, piece by piece.
It wasn’t just a playground.
It was my war.
It was home.

Every now and then, my closest friends would join me.
We weren’t soldiers.
We were just tired kids looking for something bigger than ourselves.
I still remember those perfect moments — when the plan went wrong, when the alarm blared, when everything turned to chaos — and we laughed like madmen, scrambling to survive.
We didn’t need perfect runs.
We needed memories.
It was our refuge.
It was our bond.

And now, eight years later, I go back.
The world has changed. I have changed. I’m thirty-one now.
And those friends? They’ve moved away, chasing dreams in different cities.

Yet every time I boot up Wildlands, it’s like stepping into a painting no one else can see.
The graphics are softer now, the servers quieter — but the heart is untouched.
Every sunset, every thunderstorm, every whispered radio call speaks in a language only my memory knows.
It’s the heartbeat of another life.
It’s the breath of a world where we were unstoppable.

Ghost Recon Wildlands isn’t just a game.
It’s a time machine.
It’s a second chance to feel free, to feel fearless, to feel alive.

And as the rotors whir over the endless horizon, I remain there.
Fingers on the controller...
And a tear I cannot tell — whether it’s sorrow or gratitude.

Psst, hey you, look away from my play time. I have around 90 some hours in Wildlands all together between the Gamepass version and -other- versions. Don’t worry about it, quit asking questions, what are you, a Pinkerton?

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildland, is the last Ghost Recon game with the “Tom Clancy” name at the start of the title, so Breakpoint is waaaaay on the other side of my Steam Library and it actually makes me mad.

You play as Nomad, the world’s sexiest man on his quest with the rest of his squad of Government sanctioned mass murderers to stop El Sueno, the leader of the Cartel and now rulers of Bolivia: Santa Blanca. Because Sicario came out two years before this game and that movie was good.
Santa Blanca is pushing a metric ♥♥♥♥ ton of really hard drugs into the US, as well as human trafficking and all the other horrid things Cartels like to do, so the CIA, DEA, and JSOC decide that its time for some good ol’ fashion American interventionism and sends Ghost Recon into Bolivia to completely dismantle Santa Blanca and restore a “”Proper”” Bolivian government.

But this is set five years after Advanced Warfighter and five years before Future Soldier, and neither Scott Mitchells or Joe Ramirez are willing to share their cool future tech for Nomad to use.
I mean, you can technically get some of it as cosmetics, it just doesn’t do anything for you.

Its kind of funny to think that Predator team used the experimental gear in Future Soldier, and then the US government just went “Nah, that’s ours.” and took it back before Breakpoint.

I like the Ghost Team from Wildlands, I think Nomad is a good successor to Mitchells, and Weaver, Holt, and Midas do a good job with the banter that it actually made me dislike the squad you can get in Breakpoint, which I know is a later edition so the dialogue probably wasn’t an option, but still.

Bolivia is also a very nice place to play the game, I actually like it more than Aurora. It might just be the colors and my weird fascination with Colonial Spanish/Latin American architecture, but its a very nice place to shoot and stab people under the cover of night. It might just be because of how open it is, only a few parts of the map are covered in big vegetation so you get a good view of the area when you’re just putzing around.

The game lets you play with the element of surprise, you’re outnumbered and, I don’t want to say “Outgunned”, pretending to be outgunned by these losers is like pretending I eat garbage willingly. At least early game, the Sicario don’t really put up much of a fight, even on Extreme difficulty. But as the game goes on they become more organized and have deadlier weapons. There’s also Unidad, who are the Bolivian Military Police Special Operations who have an agreement with Santa Blanca. They’re funner to fight, at least I think so.

The enemies in Wildlands never really do anything too wild, hilariously enough. They do try to advance and flank and supress, but don’t expect them to be pulling off some FEAR or Brothers in Arms tactics any time soon. Still, they keep the game interesting, and if you’re bad at firefights you can always stick to stealth, save for a few situations.

Its an open world game, you hunt Cartel members like animals, put them in the dirt or extradite them, depending on the situation, and then you move on to new and fresher territory until everyone’s pronouns are officially changed to Were/Was.

As the game goes on, you can gather resources for the Rebels, and in return you get points depending on what resources you find. You then use those points to level up your abilities. You can also get rebel support like vehicle drops and motar strikes. Though I never use them.
Because I forgot they existed.

This game is very much a “I’m coming to kill you” kind of game. I mean, how do you expect a bunch of gang guys and military police to track and properly hunt down the guys Tom Clancy specifically made for video games to enter locations and kill whatever gets in their way. Even in the first game it was just “Hello” and then everyone was dead.

There’s other content as well. Ghost War is the game’s PVP mode, but I couldn’t get a game going. There’s also drop in Co Op and a survival mode where you try not to get mulched by larger and larger enemy waves.

You can also customize your dudes to make them look how you want them to look. So you can really lean into that “Covert op guy in a foreign country’ Tier 1 look or stick out like a sore thumb with cool military gear.

I liked Wildlands, I feel like its the last game under the Tom Clancy license that Ubisoft has put out that feels like it could be an actual conflict. Breakpoint is about a tech guy super colony and Frontlines got canceled. I saw what happened with Rainbow Six and how its basically Big Hero 6 with more government spooks, and that may be for some people, but not really for me.

Get Wildlands on sale. You can get a good 50-60 hours out of it, or get it on gamepass, one of the two. Just don’t spent full price for it. The fact that most games these days don’t have a “Greatest hits” price range really burns my ass.

Wildlands gets a number out of a number, I couldn’t think of one for this review.

A group of Owls is called a Parliment.

Would you join a military black ops team led by Dirk? No? Yeah me neither.

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