Wildlands is that familiar glossy contradiction, the "gritty" quasi-realistic open world blockbuster - a work of great craft and care that's also a work of macabre war tourism, wowing you with its geography even as it casually up-sells the bankrupt fantasy of playing global policeman. Aside from being another Ubisoft love letter to icon-studded map screens, it reprises the fond Tom Clancy daydream that the answer to every festering international dilemma is a squad of all-American roughnecks armed with a list of names and a relaxed definition of collateral damage. It's a game about extrajudicial murder whose creators have taken the time to animate children playing hopscotch in schoolyards, a realm of soothing splendour in which you'll kick in the door of a village church to retrieve a laser sight accessory from the altar. It is by turns plodding and vivid, entertaining and abhorrent.
I can't quite bring myself to loathe it, but it says a lot that I keep trying to escape it - or at least, to escape the part Wildlands expects me to play in reshaping its coked-up appropriation of Bolivia (whose government has lodged a formal complaint with France over the country's depiction in the game). While crossing the landscape I typically eschew fast travel in favour of a helicopter or plane, seizing my chance to slip the surly bonds of yet another bloody mass of Ubi-brand emergent distractions - resources and gear items to gobble up like plankton, convoys to pester, patrols to waylay or be waylaid by. Up there, all you have to worry about are power lines and the impetuous handling. And the occasional surface-to-air missile.
On reaching the majestic salt flats that extend beyond the world's northwestern perimeter, I immediately leapt aboard a nearby dirtbike and roared off towards the horizon - hoping to break free of both the game's effective but desperately routine activity design and the Clancy franchise's moribund obsession with grizzled wetworkers changing the fates of nations by knifing anybody with a funny accent. Perhaps there is something outside of all this, I thought. Perhaps it'll be like that scene at the end of the Matrix 2 - a burst of radiance, a room walled with television screens and a chair swivelling to reveal the avuncular figure of Yves Guillemot, there to explain the Ubiworld's ultimate purpose. Alas, I was rewarded only with a loading break and a trip back to the nearest campsite, where I spent five minutes painting a rifle pink, tossed a grenade at a passing minibus, then climbed into my chopper and smashed it repeatedly into the ground.
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