Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Wildlands

This huge, wide-open shooter constantly shows its flaws in its mission variety and vehicle physics, but its strong, sandbox-style gameplay and seamless co-op kept me coming back for more madness. If you must repeat experiences over and over, you could far worse than helicopter chases, assassination missions, or drug busts gone wildly wrong.

Ghost Recon is a large scale cooperative shooter rich in content but with questionable lasting appeal.

Beautiful yet callous, Wildlands is a serviceable open worlder with strong co-op that doesn't quite put the Ghosts back on the map.

Not worth it as a solo adventure. In co-op, Wildlands is an enjoyable stealth romp that too often gets in its own way.

Wildlands wants to be both an ultraviolent cartoon and a grounded, ripped-from-the-headlines thriller. It can't do both, and it's much better at being silly and absurd. The mechanical experience of it is as freewheeling a sandbox as I've ever seen, but the frame, the tone and the script weigh it down like an anchor.

A stunning open world, brutal combat, and deep customization combine to bring Ghost Recon roaring back from the dead.

A game best experienced with friends, Wildlands is a surprisingly long adventure that gives players a lot of tools for tactical experimentation. Solo play is viable as well, but with by-the-books companion A.I., your strategic options are more limited

With friends in tow, Wildlands could well prove to be The Wall of its genre; but much like a Roger Waters solo album, it loses some of the sparkle on its own.

All this and more reveals Wildlands to be a shooter that has been released messy and unfinished, a practice that Ubi is doing with increased proficiency with each passing game, seemingly using their beta tests as demos and marketing opportunities instead of using them to actually test and repair their game to an acceptable level.

Wildlands is a bad f***ing game -- it completely fails at everything it aspires to be. It's a bad co-op game, it's a bad shooter, it's a bad open-world game, and the writing is terrible. At best, the game is boring.