Ghost Recon: Future Soldier Preview

If you want to showcase what your game is set to offer when it's released later in the year, you throw-out a BETA. It has to be a flavour of what to expect whilst not giving too much away, teasing its users to purchase the game when it comes round to it. If that's the case, why on Earth did Ubisoft release such a poor, unpolished, almost unplayable (at times) BETA? Your guess is as good as mine.

When this game was announced and displayed at E3 last year I had high hopes and it was one of the games that stood out for me. Kinect integration, the game customisation and the general look of the game really caught my eye; but now, I'm forced to be pessimistic towards it due to this sub-standard release of a BETA.

BETAs aren't meant to be perfect and they aren't meant to show the entire finished product, but they should at least be played with enjoyment, certainly not frustration. Bugs and glitches riddle this multiplayer BETA more so than any other BETA I have experienced playing; even with a decent host, God forbid you have an awful host, the problems can increase ten-fold.

Laggy kills, lack of hit detection on yourself and enemies, jittery, off-putting camera movement, stunningly low frame-rate at times, confusing controls, lack of control knowledge, references to a manual for key issues, random enemy teleportations, confusing "kill cams" - the list goes on. There doesn't seem to be problems all the time however, as a few games can be free from some of these annoyances, which begs the question; will games be this inconsistently glitchy at launch? If Ubisoft pick up on these clearly apparent issues then I'm sure it will be a game to be cherished, not thrown out the window.

The game shows potential. Although unavailable in the BETA, the Kinect integration looks intriguing and would give me a solid reason to get use out of my rather dusty peripheral. The gun customisation is vast, giving players the largest possible array of choice on gun tweaking. The maps are great and the cover/shoot system is extremely intuitive when it works, giving the player the ability to know exactly where they will go from one piece of cover to another using a waypoint. The clean HUD is also very nice to see; not an awful lot clogging the screen. As positive as these aspects may be, you need a concrete foundation on which to put them for there to be any use to this game.

I feel like I have been harsh on Tom Clancy's soon-to-be newest venture into the video game world but I genuinely hope once this game is released this month, something is done about the simply irritating issues that surround the bug-flooded game. Don't hold off buying this game at launch, as long as you know of these issues being fixed.