Breakpoint is a miserable experience. Getting across the world is a chore, missions are dull and repetitive, it’s ugly, and the story made my brain want to escape my skull and hop into a bin. Ubisoft’s continued tradition of smushing all its ideas into its games until there’s no semblance of individuality remaining has peaked.
Usually, even if the game itself isn’t great, Ubisoft’s maps are wonderfully crafted. They’re based on real locations, painstakingly researched and referenced to create a beautiful, exaggerated version of a place, capturing its essence in digital form.
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Auroa is an uninspired hodgepodge of mountains, flatlands, jungle, and scientific compounds. You can navigate across it on-foot, by car, by motorcycle, by boat, and by helicopter. It feels like it has been designed with only helicopters in mind.
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Even if it’s a short distance away, though, you often get plonked in front of a sheer cliff with no way up but by spamming the climb button to clumsily bump your way up a mountain, occasionally tumbling back down in an irritating canned rolling animation.
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Even more bizarrely, stats don’t seem to do anything other than make you die slightly slower. Like I said, bad guys go down in a single headshot. That’s good! It means you can be stealthy! It also means every single gun within the same class is functionally identical. You’re just swapping them out to see the number rise in the equipment screen.
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At one point, I sent my drone to scan an area – since modern Ubisoft swapped out towers for a drone fetish – and one soldier was marked with a message: “Kill him to earn interesting loot”. I killed him and got some +1 fingerless gloves, which I suppose is better than -1 fingerless gloves. But I wouldn’t call it “interesting”, would you?
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The closest this game comes to giving you freedom of approach is the ability to bail out of a helicopter, using the exploding chopper as noise cover as you parachute into the other side of the base. The most interesting piece of equipment, a fence cutting tool, is locked behind the levelling system and then behind a crafting system, so you have to grind to unlock it. Or, you know, you can pay to skip some of the grind in a wide array of microtransactions – acknowledgment that skipping content is a good thing.
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I really wanted to like Breakpoint. Ubisoft has a habit of making mediocre games – Assassin’s Creed, Watch Dogs – really shine with a sequel, but this is a significant step back. I would rather play Anthem – at least traversal doesn’t make me want to put my head through a window in that game.