Today will see the latest expansion DLC pack for Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands released for everyone following the early access for Season Pass holders since last week. This DLC is a direct follow up to the completion of the main story campaign and will follow the events following the dismantling of the Santa Blanca crime organisation and will place the Ghosts in extreme danger. In what promises to turn the hunters into the hunted, it is time to see what happens next to the ‘Fallen Ghosts’

It has not been that long since the first Expansion, ‘Narco Road’, was released. It featured a stand alone story of a Ghost agent going undercover. Gameplay was a little more of an arcade action style DLC and almost parody to an extent but it did remove the core feature of GRW of having a squad to support the player in solo and overall had a lighter hearted feel. But now ‘Fallen Ghosts’ is a far more serious in tone story expansion, bringing back many of the elements of the main story campaign including having squad mates to help.

The premise is simple as this expansion is a direct continuation of the main story post completion. With the Santa Blanca cartel now destroyed, a power vacuum has been left in Bolivia forcing the Unidad security to reach out for help in keeping control of the country. Many answer the call but instead of providing help, the opportunistic group of would be criminals and mercenary soldiers start taking over former Santa Blanca territory, resuming the business. Forming what is referred to as ‘Los Extranjeros’ (The Foreigners) , they quickly establish themselves as an elite and heavily armed force in the country. The Ghosts are sent in to find out what is going on, to rescue US citizens stuck in the area and to take down this new threat before civil war destroys Bolivia.

I really liked the idea behind this expansion, especially from a story and gameplay point of view. The first problem though is how the initially teased tone of it quickly contradicts itself. It begins with the Ghosts on route back into Bolivia, having the mission explained to them when suddenly their helicopter is shot down, crashing in a forest area and finding them being hunted by Los Extranjeros soldiers. My issue with this is that the whole “hunters become the hunted” only lasts for about fifteen minutes of gameplay before it simply becomes exactly what the main story campaign was. I would have loved to have had this expansion open up with the ghosts truly outgunned and under threat before the gameplay returned to standard form.

Another annoyance is that yet again as with ‘Narco Road’, this expansion forces the player to create a brand new Ghost agent rather than having the option to continue on with the agent from the player’s main game. At the very least offer players new creation options in voices and appearance but instead, you can simply recreate that same agent or another very easily but again it just contradicts the forced requirement to make a new agent. That said, the agent you create will have immediately be at Level 30 with all skills maxed out other than the new skills that come with this content. I just would have liked some new options to go along with this expansion to make it feel more unique.

Fallen Ghosts offers four new bosses and fifteen missions to tackle, and feels very much back in tone with the main campaign in terms of going to a region, completing missions to unlock an opportunity to take out its leader before moving on to the next one. It feels very familiar in having the squad back to aid or more often then not, simply be there with you for a vehicle ride along. The same enemies return as well with gangs to tackle and Unidad forces but the main threat will come from the newly formed Los Extranjeros. These guys are far more deadly than anything seen the game before and the challenge is upped quite a bit. These guys are geared up to handle the Ghosts with Snipers able to track targets with more accuracy, heavy soldiers that can really take punishment. But it is their tech level that will offer the biggest change in strategy and tactics for players to deal with. They will have jamming devices, soldiers that carry backpack gear that will prevent the player from using any form of tech such as the drone, mini-map and vision options such as thermal and night vision. This can alter how you approach a target area and taking these guys out will be critical to a successful operation, giving the action a nice new twist.

It felt good to go back to the main story and see the after effects of completing the main story, to see that it was not the usual ‘happy ever after’ game ending is refreshing. Gathering intelligence and planning an attack before confronting a mission objective falls more in line with what I as a player would expect to do with my squad of Ghost agents. It was something that made the ‘Narco Road’ expansion feel more disconnected and standalone but a return to the world of Ghost Recon: Wildlands for this final expansion is a welcome one. Though more content is set to come for the game in terms of updates that will come to every player with or without the season pass and talks of a PvP mode, Fallen Ghosts is a nice way to round off the expansion DLC for the game.

I liked Fallen Ghosts, it offers a new challenge but with familiar gameplay to complete the player experience with Ghost Recon: Wildlands. Whilst the game still has the same issues today as it had on release in terms of cringe worthy dialogue and some very iffy AI moments, it is still a tonne of fun both in solo play and with a group of mates, which is where the team tactics element comes alive. The story is solid and believable as a continuation of the main campaign which keeps the action grounded.

If you have enjoyed Ghost Recon: Wildlands up to now, than this expansion is more of that gameplay with enough changes to make it worthwhile to play but ultimately is just more of the same with a few bells and whistles.

I honestly was not sure what to expect from this game going into it. It is a game that has been on PC since last year but now finally coming to consoles, which to me means that opportunities to correct faults and adjust gameplay based on feedback were aplenty before it came to Xbox One and PlayStation 4. But I also do love a good cop story and this game had the promise of delivering something rather different. So I made a fresh pot of tea, notepad and pencil at the ready and fired up ‘This is the Police’ and got to work.

‘This is the Police’ is an intriguing game to be sure, putting the player in the role of Police Chief Frank Boyd a seasoned and grizzled cop whose life has been on the rather unkind side of late with his wife having left him, in charge of a Police Force full of dodgy officers in a city on the precipice of falling to the criminals and corruption, with a Mayor who perhaps is purest example of everything that is wrong in that town. Frank does not have an easy job, made suddenly worse when the Mayor forces him into retirement, giving him just six months on the job and one huge problem for Frank, no pension to look forward to. This all makes for one bad situation for our hero and the making of what should be a very interesting story and game.

The story is told via narration from Frank Boyd himself, telling the player about his life, his views on the city and about the job itself. Voiced by Jon St John, most known for the Duke Nukem character, it really sets the tone for this late 1980’s world and very quickly gives the player the sense that old Frank is pretty much on the tail end of a terrible run of luck. Opening with a press conference where Frank has to explain his sudden retirement announcement, giving the player the opportunity to respond as Frank is a neat little way of putting the player into the role of Frank straight away, with dialogue options following a lengthy narration by Frank into how bleak it all is.

It does take some time to actually get to what you could call real gameplay, a slow pace which runs all the way through the game that grows rather tedious after an hour or so of trying to actually do something other than listening to Frank moan and complain. ‘This is the Police’ is an adventure strategy game at its core, but 50% of it is pretty much just listening to Frank narrating stuff which starts off kind of cool but quickly becomes more of a “just get your own blog dude” annoyance. Thankfully when you do get too actually to the strategy gameplay element it does become far more interesting, well at first at least.

As Chief of Police, Frank’s main job is organising the shifts for the Police Station for the day and assigning cops to the crimes that get called into the station. Crimes range from mundane day to day stuff to much deeper themed crimes later on. The aim is to not only catch criminals but also to run the police force in a profitable manner in order to help increase Frank’s salary and provide the sum of $500.000 he feels he needs to retire on. Now the city of Freeburg is pretty much a hellhole of a place, with corruption and crime pretty much overflowing everywhere which makes the task of policing this town somewhat…tricky.

At first crimes seem fairly routine, ranging from fights to drunken behaviour and sending a couple of cops to the scene will lead to capturing the criminal quickly enough and the days pass without issue. But soon it becomes more of a challenge as not only will the number of reported crimes increase but the quality of the police force becomes more apparently rubbish than first thought. Cops will start to ask for the day off for a number of differing reasons from feeling sick to crazily wanting the day off to see a film with their favourite actor. The truth is, the cops Frank is commanding over are lazy and some are just as corrupt as the criminals. On my second day on the job, sending a cop to investigate a disturbance at the local casino resulting in the cop resigning from the force after the casino owner made him a better job offer paying far more than a cop’s salary. I also had two cops from the off who were unable to catch any criminals at all, each job I sent them on had the culprit escaping meaning a reduction in their worth. Soon cops that were unhappy with me refusing their day off or felt I was over working them by you know, making them do their jobs, soon starting filing complaints against me as chief which led to the Mayor’s office decreasing my budget and hating me even more. One thing is for certain, this game is out to get you!

The strategy side to this game does feel very much in line with that of X-Com in terms of the need to keep a balance between all the different factions in the game to try and keep them happy in order to make Frank’s job as easy as possible. This will mean trying to keep his squad happy, the Mayor’s office happy and at certain points, the criminals happy such as the Mafia. Like X-Com, this game will punish you for making the wrong call and when things start to go bad, they will continue to go bad for you. However, unlike X-Com, This is the Police rarely gives you the opportunity to put things right or get on a better path which for me becomes the biggest pain of this game. The results of sending cops to crime more often than note simply feel like a random game of chance, with only the element of luck determining whether or not it goes the right way. So whilst you can try to put the best squad together, ultimately it is not a guarantee you will catch the bad guys and save the day. This leads to playthroughs that can ultimately turn straight to hell with some poor choices or mistakes that have no recovery options. Due to how slow the pace of the game is, you can lose hours of gameplay as a result of something turning sour randomly and even if you firefight from that point, in the end it wont count for anything leaving a real frustrating dissatisfaction with the game.

That is where ‘This is the Police’ really falls down. It puts really emphasis on having Frank’s life story told in the cut-scenes and narration sequences with a pace so tedious at times you just end up skipping it entirely in order to get to the gameplay. But then the gameplay can be really unforgiving if it all starts to go wrong with the only option to start over again and hope rather than plan, for a better run next time. I never got the impression that I could actually save the city nor did I actually care that crimes were failing to get solved or if giving half the shift the day off so they can go bowling or to the cinema meant leaving the shifts under-powered for that day. The action can be broken up by actually running investigations where you can assign detectives to work a case, giving the chance to look at clues to try and solve the crime but these don’t last very long or have any real impact on the gameplay when the normal day to day cop stuff goes pearr shape on you.

If you have the patience to persevere through the narration and the cut scenes to get to the gameplay, the old school desire to beat the game can be the driving force to help old Frank get to retirement. However for me, I needed more gameplay and the sense I could actually make a difference instead of the few seconds given to me to select which cops to respond to which crimes that would lead to me cleaning up the city. I just never felt that what I was doing was making a difference, so imbalanced was the games need to make everything go wrong, there just is not enough there to give the player a chance to crawl it all back. Something I would have expected to have been addressed before it came to console. Having the game making the player feel rubbish is never a fun way to spend several hours in the game only to have to restart or just accept failure.

This is the Police just trips up on itself far too much to be completely enjoyable, and whilst it has some really intriguing elements to it, it simply ends up falling flat too many times which is a real shame,