Writing this review after doing everything on highest difficulty, eliminating every possible target, collecting every medal, skill point, weapon and their accessories in co-op.

This game starts out really nice, it gives you a sense of freedom, map is beautiful and huge, there's a massive choice of weapons, possibilities feel endless. but that illusion quickly breaks.
first sign was when i tried hiding in a trunk of a targets vehicle and he just spawned a random truck out of nowhere and started driving it instead. after 7-8 hours of playtime you start to notice every mission has a very specific way to approach it, story important NPCs that you have to extract or eliminate don't spawn until you reach a certain point so you cant scout them out or think of your own way of doing the mission, most bases are covered with long unbreakable fences forcing you into using one specific entry point, every weapon feels almost exactly the same, only noticeable difference being how much damage you can deal to vehicles with them. on top of all that stealth just refuses to work sometimes, you can be wearing a camo suit, laying prone in a bush at night while wearing an invisibility backpack and still get spotted by an enemy who wasn't even looking in your direction. enemy AI likes to slowly migrate towards you, no matter if they have any clue about your position or not eventually there will be 50 soldiers surrounding you, while friendly AI or rebel support does nothing even after maxing out their skills. multiple missions forget that this is supposed to be a stealth game and throw a defense mission at you where you have to survive waves of enemies for few minutes, sometimes missions just fail because you didn't follow ubisofts script perfectly, sometimes you just get softlocked and have to kill yourself to restart etc.
all this and more, while it takes 50+ long and tedious hours to beat the main game with all the extra side content.

Wildlands ultimately feels like a very stretched out and heavily scripted game pretending to be a sandbox.

Writing this review after doing everything on highest difficulty, eliminating every possible target, collecting every medal, skill point, weapon and their accessories in co-op. This game starts out really nice, it gives you a sense of freedom, map is beautiful and huge, there's a massive choice of weapons, possibilities feel endless. but that illusion quickly breaks. first sign was when i tried hiding in a trunk of a targets vehicle and he just spawned a random truck out of nowhere and started driving it instead. after 7-8 hours of playtime you start to notice every mission has a very specific way to approach it, story important NPCs that you have to extract or eliminate don't spawn until you reach a certain point so you cant scout them out or think of your own way of doing the mission, most bases are covered with long unbreakable fences forcing you into using one specific entry point, every weapon feels almost exactly the same, only noticeable difference being how much damage you can deal to vehicles with them. on top of all that stealth just refuses to work sometimes, you can be wearing a camo suit, laying prone in a bush at night while wearing an invisibility backpack and still get spotted by an enemy who wasn't even looking in your direction. enemy AI likes to slowly migrate towards you, no matter if they have any clue about your position or not eventually there will be 50 soldiers surrounding you, while friendly AI or rebel support does nothing even after maxing out their skills. multiple missions forget that this is supposed to be a stealth game and throw a defense mission at you where you have to survive waves of enemies for few minutes, sometimes missions just fail because you didn't follow ubisofts script perfectly, sometimes you just get softlocked and have to kill yourself to restart etc. all this and more, while it takes 50+ long and tedious hours to beat the main game with all the extra side content. Wildlands ultimately feels like a very stretched out and heavily scripted game pretending to be a sandbox.