“Nimble Guardian” – Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Future Soldier

**Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Future Soldier** (Ubisoft, Xbox 360, 2012)

In May 2012, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Future Soldier became the seventh Tom Clancy game to reach #1 in the UK charts. As a series, that put it in rarefied company. Seven number ones was more than Zelda, Sonic the Hedgehog or Call of Duty had yet reached. Tomb Raider, Championship Manager and Medal of Honor had all burned too bright to make it to seven. Gran Turismo had just about got there. Only more durable names still could outdo Tom Clancy. FIFA and Star Wars were unstoppably far ahead in the twenties and late teens respectively; Grand Theft Auto and Final Fantasy were on eight. Pokémon was on ten, albeit including a couple of pairs of largely identical games.

Finally, also on ten, and making for the best comparison, was Mario. The ten Mario games to have topped the charts included an assortment of 2D and 3D platformers, two Mario Kart games, platformer-RPG Super Paper Mario, and Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games. There is not a huge commonality to trace through these besides Mario himself and the associated characters and settings. One of them (the Olympics one) wasn’t even developed by Nintendo. Still, across those and more varying genres still, Mario acted as a successful branding for tone and merit, a mascot-shaped seal of quality.

For Ubisoft, the name Tom Clancy was working in a similar way for something more abstract still. Tom Clancy does not star in any of those games, and didn’t have anything to do with writing them. Characters and locations come and go across them. Yet his brand was still consistent across Splinter Cell, Rainbow Six and now two different Ghost Recon sub-series, a branching tree of success. None of those games were ever mega-hits, but most had multiple weeks at #1. They had a winning formula that few could match.

There are consistent elements to Tom Clancy games beyond the name. They feature Americans globe-hopping in secret to respond to urgent foreign threats, paranoia always justified. Future Soldier starts off in Nicaragua for a brief intro, ending in a Call of Duty-style killing of the whole squad you’ve been following. From there it covers several continents before ending up in Russia. Constant interference is “the cost we choose to pay for our nation”, enemies are evil and all actions are justified in protection. Torturing people to extract info and then killing them anyway is standard.

That’s not particularly unique to Tom Clancy, of course. The more distinctive through-line is the extent of its focus on technology. Gun fetishism is a common sight in shooters, but Future Soldier takes it to a whole new level, letting you reverently examine and customise every element of your weapons in 3D. While swapping out underbarrels, stock, muzzle, side rails and more, I felt like I was in Forza Motorsport 4’s car explorer mode. The guns you carry are frequently circled with an electric blue halo, just to ram home that there is some fancy high tech going on right here. The technology also gets much more pervasive and imaginative than that, though.

The original Splinter Cell had you using devices to look through keyholes, and a PDA light-meter and night goggles. Tom Clancy games afterwards introduced things like heartbeat meters giving you the chance to predict enemies in a room, and augmented reality HUDs meaning your soldiers were diegetically seeing instructions on screen. Future Soldier adds some Metal Gear Solid 4-style magic camouflage, plus magnetic goggles to navigate amid a gnarly sandstorm, and sensors which you can throw for a much more powerful version of the heartbeat meter. Chuck one of those and nearby enemies will be highlighted in yellow and red, the system somehow able to distinguish them from civilians.

Ubisoft use this in large part to provide a constant flow of novelties. New tech opens up new variations on shooting to guide you through. Tag these people, fly this drone, sneak up invisibly on those brutes. The game also throws in the occasional set-piece like a shootout in a market that quickly creates a fleshy watermelon haze too, just to make sure. Each game guarantees a new set of mechanical inventions, tied to an unchanging landscape and objectives. A series of future soldiers, in the same old wars. It’s hard to miss the artificiality of it all, the fact that you are essentially playing a video game about soldiers playing a lethal video game. (There is a link there to the distancing-via-technology in Assassin’s Creed, too.)

The embracing of their mediated nature is central to the consistent appeal of Tom Clancy games, and follows right through from Splinter Cell’s vision of a narratively simplified Metal Gear Solid. The flashy artificiality is always both in-world and played completely straight. There are never any meta moments, any acknowledgement or how unlikely any of this stuff is. Instead, it’s a video game about a video game version of war, for a version of ‘video game’ where narrative complexity is stuck somewhere around Green Beret. It’s a well-scoped out niche and, especially combined with the Xbox 360 generation’s machinery of online multiplayer, it was one which kept working out commercially.