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Ghost Recon: Desert Siege

by James Sterrett

Article Type: Review
Article Date: April 16, 2002

Product Info

Product Name: Ghost Recon
Category: FPS Tactical Shooter
Developer: RedStorm
Publisher: Ubi Soft
Release Date: Released
Min. Spec: Click Here
Files & Links: Click Here

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Getting slaughtered on a Quick Mission

The trouble with reviewing add-on packs is that a good one doesn’t really need much of a review. Bad add-on packs provide an opportunity for a spicy negative review, and brilliant add-on packs provide an opening for a rave about squeezing so much more out of the game engine. Good add-on packs just follow in the pattern of the original game, providing more of the same. That’s good news for fans, and bad news for folks who wanted a change, but there’s not so much room to maneuver when you write, since the gameplay is already well-known. Ghost Recon: Desert Siege presents precisely this problem for a reviewer: it delivers more Ghost Recon. If you’re a fan of the original, you’ll love the add-on. If some aspects of the original irritated you…well, those are still there too.

Water... must... have.. water...

Desert Siege posits a rebel government in Ethiopia which renews its war with Eritrea, and the Ghosts are sent in to help the Eritreans sort out the resulting mess over the course of eight missions. Fortunately, the missions are all very well done. Some require a methodical assault while others require rapid movement for success. Some are in wide-open spaces while others, especially the second mission’s refinery area, can get positively claustrophobic. The Ethiopian enemy is at least as tough as the foes in the original Ghost Recon. If you don’t like to lose people in a mission, and won’t use the quicksave function, be prepared to restart missions frequently.

The clautrophobic Refinery

You cannot import your team from Ghost Recon into Desert Siege, but you do get a couple of points with which to beef up your initial stats. In addition, the specialists you can get by completing bonus goals have excellent stats and will likely form the bulk of your team once you have them. Four specialists return from Ghost Recon, and one new guy appears: Jodit Haile, an Eritrean who packs along a PKM machine gun. In addition, there are nine new weapons, mostly only available in multiplayer. These include the aforementioned PKM, the M-60 machine gun, and the Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle. Another new wrinkle is that the Ethiopians sometimes ride around in trucks or jeeps. It is less threatening than it seems, since it packs them into one grenade blast or anti-tank rocket shot if you can hit the vehicle, but it looks neat when they drive in, pile out, and start shooting. Once the troopers dismount, the threat level rises due to their high accuracy!

Braking glass is how many years' bad luck?

In addition to the eight mission maps, there are five new maps for multiplayer or quick mission play. The settings of these vary from dense woodlands in some levels, to the tortuous, and somewhat fantastical, rock bridges and gullies of the Ravines map. Two new multiplayer modes are also available. In Domination, each team begins with a base, and there’s a neutral base in the center. As in most Domination games, you gain points for controlling bases over time. More unusual is the Siege mode. Up to four teams deploy, and the smallest one is designated the Defender. If an attacking group can keep someone alive in the defender’s base for 5 seconds, that group wins. Of course, only one attacking group can win, which makes a multi-front battle likely on the way to the defender’s base.

The Ravine map

If you didn’t care for the original Ghost Recon, Desert Siege is unlikely to change your mind. The code for setting waypoints on the in-mission command map has been improved, and it’s much easier to restart from a saved position after failing a mission. You still need to babysit all of your fire teams, however, and the fog clipping is still close. Both of these are basic design decisions and are unlikely to change. Babysitting of fireteams is to ensure the player is essential to the action. Richard Dansky explained the reasoning behind the clipping plane in a recent COMBATSIM interview found here—and, in fairness, his reasoning makes good sense—but it still makes for scenes that look decidedly odd at times. There are still places on the map which look like you ought to be able to step across them, but you can’t. The enemy still starts out in the same place every time, so the variation on replaying is limited.

Ambushed tanks burning in the desert sun

All in all, though, there’s not much to complain about if you liked Ghost Recon. The missions are fun, well designed, and engaging. If you’re a Ghost Recon fan, you’ll be thrilled by Desert Siege, and the price of $20 for eight missions is about the same per-mission rate you paid in the original (at $40 for 15 missions). To return to the dilemma mentioned at the beginning of this review, Desert Siege may not add mind-bogglingly brilliant new twists to the game, but it is equally certainly not a dog. It’s a good, solid mission pack, and if you want more Ghost Recon, that’s exactly what it delivers.

On target!



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