- Audience-Alienating Ending: The fact that the game doesn't even have a conclusive ending was enough to put off potential players who were expecting a complete story experience like previous Ghost Recon games had provided. The Red Patriot DLC seems to provide a conclusive ending to the game's overall main campaign, but it does feel fairly abrupt and feels as though the writers had no overarching plan.
- Contested Sequel: After the massive patches that reworked the game into something fans could properly consider Ghost Recon, it's ultimately this with its immediate predecessor, Wildlands: on one hand, the game smooths out movement and interactions considerably compared to the rather clunky prequel, and has a number of updates, quality of life improvements and factors on top which, combined with turning gear loot off, makes it flow a lot more naturally as a shooter. On the other hand, the story is extremely hit or miss, Auroa is a lot more barren as an open world sandbox than the dense and lively Bolivia, and the hard-shift focus towards more of a fantastical science fiction really doesn't do the game much favors; one either puts up with the gameplay of Breakpoint or the content of Wildlands, if either at all for longer-term fans.
- Goddamned Bats: The Murmur drones are fast, with erratic flight patterns and hard-hitting machine guns that can penetrate wooden walls.
- He Really Can Act: While it's not a particularly challenging role,note who would have expected
professional skater Rodney Mullen would give as good a performance as he does as Jace Skell, particularly with nailing the character's specific lofty dreams/tech optimist verbal tones. - Hilarious in Hindsight:
- The game's Tomb Raider crossover might be more humorous now that Female Nomad's voice actress, Alix Wilton Regan, is the new voice of Lara Croft.
- During a conversation with Skell, Nomad points out it would have been easier for him to lease an empty part of California to set up his vision of World 2.0. In August 2023 a real estate development company called California Forever announced plans to purchase over 50,000 acres of farmland outside of the San Francisco Bay Area for constructing a new high-tech city with investments coming from wealthy Silicon Valley tycoons.
- Narm: While the Ghost Recon series is no stranger to cheesy dialogue, the back-and-forth in Breakpoint veers wildly between overly dramatic statements and long pauses between sentences, and any military characters suddenly jumping into stock standard soldier jargon jokes to lighten the mood. Considering the Darker and Edgier nature of the plot, the Mood Whiplash can be staggering at times.
- Obvious Beta: On release, the game was riddled with bugs of all stripes, a number of UI issues, such as stating the wrong caliber on virtually every weapon in the game, and the in-game descriptions, tips and subtitles are loaded with typos. The PS4 version in particular launched with a placeholder description for the Share button that was complete gibberish, which became the subject of a short, mocking Kotaku article.
- Scrappy Mechanic: Due to a combination of poor implementation, Genre Shift, and changes to the classic Ghost Recon formula, reviewers and fans have found plenty to complain about the game.
- The game's gear score system feels tacked on, as it doesn't really provide any sort of meaningful progression except as an excuse to lock you out of certain quests or convince you to buy gear and xp boosters to skip the grind. Also, the fact that human enemies can be instantly killed with a headshot regardless of gear score difference makes the entire system feel superfluous. Notably this was one of the biggest things to be addressed with the "Ghost Experience" update, allowing players to completely turn off the gear level system in favor of a more classic experience.
- The lack of AI squadmates until an update in July 2020 means you're typically at a huge disadvantage playing solo, as you have nobody to back you up and makes the world feel even more empty and lifeless.
- The respawn system for co-op players is generally regarded as awful, as the game will usually spawn players hundreds of meters away from their party with no regard to the terrain between them, such as on the other side of a non-traversable cliff. Vehicles spawned in bivouacs also have all these same problems as the second coming of Wildlands' vehicle deliveries, with it being a 50/50 shot whether the vehicle spawned when you rest at a bivouac will be easy to get to in two seconds or will require you to traverse a nearly-impossible rock slide or jump 300 meters down a cliff face.
- Drones in general. Aerial ones go down easy but are difficult to hit - Azraels fly so high that sniper rifles are about all that can even reach them without having to just spray in an upwards direction, while everything else (Murmurs, Sky Cherubim, Succubus and its upgrades) flits around constantly at high speed as soon as they even suspect an intruder. Ground ones, inversely, are easier to hit but take absurd amounts of damage if you can't hit the tiny weakpoint, which on any mobile ground drone hides itself after you do enough damage to it (though with the benefit that it also stuns the drone for a bit to give you some breathing room) - only a rocket will take out an Incubus or its variants in one hit, while a Behemoth or Byleth is so heavily armored you might as well not even bother with explosives because they won't leave much more than a small dent. And, of course, taking on an outpost with drones in it, especially ground-based ones, means accepting that it is almost inevitable that you will be spotted: taking them out first means alerting the human enemies with their explosions, while taking out the personnel first means the drones will be alerted from seeing the bodies and then "just happen" to expand their patrol to wherever you happen to be. The only upside is that if you use a lot of ammo taking out a drone you will almost invariably get it all back from their drops, and the Echelon class can make relatively quick work of them with its shock pistol: flying drones go down in one hit, assuming you can hit them, which only alerts anyone from a comically-tiny radius around the crash site, and ground drones are stunned indefinitely until the base is set on alert by other means, which nobody bats an eye at, and even once a base is on full alert it still stuns them for about five seconds, enough to plant some C4 and get back into hiding if they're close enough when you stun them.
- It's not only entirely possible, but even likely, for you to die simply because you got locked into an animation at the wrong time. Future Soldier managed to include animations that were both fast and fluid, but for some reason the series since then has not been able to do both - and whereas Wildlands prioritized speed at the expensive of fluidity, resulting in animations with a surprising amount of jank but which never pin you down in one place for too long, Breakpoint prioritizes fluidity at the expense of any sense of urgency, so that there are only two things you can do in this game thatare faster than it was in Wildlands, which are is switching weapons and, if you're wearing physical ones, activating or removing night-vision goggles. This means you have more control over exactly what your character is doing, e.g. trying to move in a crouch or while prone no longer results in Nomad awkwardly spinning themself around to face whichever direction the camera is pointing when it's much simpler to just walk or crawl in the direction the model is already facing while only turning their head to face the camera's direction, but it also means you're likely locked into the slowest possible animation of standing back up from prone if a bad guy suddenly drops a grenade right on top of you and you need to get out of there right now. Using a syringe when you're low on health is likewise a crapshoot between getting a relatively quick animation that gets you back in the fight as soon as your health has recharged from it or a much slower one where Nomad shakes their arm after injecting it for several seconds, leaving you unable to cancel it out to just shoot the guys that are quickly taking back all the health you just regained - same for trying to pick up a body to shift it out of sight, which is already a slow enough process but may also play an animation where you're locked in place for two or three seconds after you've already hoisted the body up, more than enough time for the patrol you're trying to hide the body from to spot you directly. And, naturally, the more tense the situation you're in, thus the more need for the relatively faster animation, usually means you're more likely to get the slower one instead. Even simply walking can end in you accidentally throwing yourself off a high place because if you quickly press the opposite direction to that which you're already moving in, the game forces you to take several steps before it acknowledges you wanted to move in a different direction.
- Though the camera is improved from that of Wildlands, this is mostly through the addition of an in-game setting to force it to go back to hovering over whichever shoulder you manually set it to whenever you leave cover, and with enough scrutiny it's clear that this is for the most part just a bandaid solution that does nothing to solve the underlying problems, chief among them the fact that the game is still clearly biased towards the left shoulder for whatever reason - for instance, trying to take cover behind a wall will almost invariably result in your character facing to the left, with the camera shifting over that shoulder, even if there's no conceivable reason to be focused in that direction (such as hiding behind a box where there's nothing to the left but a solid wall) unless you have your viewpoint focused more than 30 degrees to the right when you press against it.
- Comparatively minor to some others, but going inside anything the game classifies as a proper building slows your regular movement speed, for no reason whatsoever.
- Tainted by the Preview: Fan reaction to the open beta was mixed, with many Ghost Recon fans questioning many of the gameplay changes from the original games and even Wildlands. For example, the inclusion of RPG elements, bullet sponge drones, absence of AI squadmates, and additional microtransactions.
- On the topic of microtransactions, the level of monetization in the game (everything from guns and skins to XP Boosters and Character points) that was revealed just before the release of the game led to a huge backlash against the game with Ubisoft later issuing an half-hearted apology saying that the XP Boosters and Character points were meant for the post-game.
- Tear Jerker: Fox's death, and Harmony's reaction upon being told, as well as Weaver's death, and Holt and Nomad mourning him.
- That One Level: If there were any one mission that could sour one on the game, it would be the finale of the "Deep State" DLC. It starts out incredible: sneaking into a heavily-fortified base under the orders of Sam Fisher, backed by a low-key tune in the same style of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, making sure not to alert enemies while disabling the security and SAM sites so Sam can have a helicopter fly in and grab an HVT. Then once all the SAMs are down, you hear a strange noise topside, and upon investigating, discover the HVT preparing several waves of drones using the CLAW system he's been developing behind the scenes. What follows is a multi-phase fight against several drones, one of the least popular parts of the game: aerial drones that never stop moving spawn at a constant rate throughout, while the second phase sends out a pair of Incubus ground drones and the third sends out a Byleth that will quickly carpet half the arena (the half with any cover from all the drones, of course) with toxic gas, all the while occasionally getting shot in the back by any guards you chose to sneak past rather than just silently kill in the first half of the mission. It can be made easier by focusing on the CLAW modules once Sam exposes them for you, since taking one out will immediately disable any still-active drones for that wave... except for the final one, which still leaves the Byleth up and running for you to take down manually.
- They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Breakpoint was an effort by Ubisoft to change Ghost Recon into an RPG "looter-shooter" similar to The Division or Destiny. The attempt at a Genre Shift was near-universally hated by the Ghost Recon fanbase because the changes took away from the realism and verisimilitude that the franchise was known for, leading to the "Ghost Experience" update allowing players to turn off gear score and set several more realistic mechanics.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
- For all the effort to cast a popular actor like Jon Bernthal to play Walker, the game doesn't really do much with his character other than portraying him as the standard "disenfranchised soldier who wants to start a revolution" archetype who rarely appears in person.
- The developers put a surprising amount of effort into developing the character of Nomad's squad from the trailers (Fury, Vasily, and Fixit), considering they're basically just multiplayer skins and have absolutely no role in the game itself, unlike Nomad's squad from Wildlands. The devs eventually added them back to single player due to fan backlash.
- On that same note, Walker's lieutenants have very little to do in the story apart from serving as bosses for Nomad to kill. Their backstories are only detailed in the artbook and objectives pages where they are revealed to be former Ghosts like Walker.
- Red Patriot features the return of Raven's Rock and the Bodark. However, instead of a brand new faction with new units and abilities like Los Extrajneros from Wildlands's Fallen Ghosts DLC, Raven's Rock seems to consist solely of about half a dozen Bodark officers commanding a bunch of the usual Sentinel and Wolf soldiers. Said Bodarks are likewise mostly just re-skinned Elite Wolves, though most of them are at least given some sort of Interesting Situation Duel boss fight, like setting hostages with bombs at a separate site that will detonate if he discovers you or one that comes out after protecting kidnapped scientists from several waves of Wolves. Bodark soldiers do appear in the DLC trailer, but don't seem to be in the actual game itself. However, Bodark as a separate faction with new Elite Mooks was added in Operation Motherland, the game's Season 2.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: At the end of the base game, there was the implication that Skell's drones would go out of control as they were noted to begin exhibiting emergent behaviors they were not programmed with. However, as of the Red Patriot DLC, nothing has come of this, as the Ghosts' primary conflicts focus around Stone and similarly human opponents intent on using the drones for their own purposes.
- Uncertain Audience: A major reason that the game flopped as hard as it did. Longtime Ghost Recon fans disliked the loot mechanics and RPG elements shoehorned into the game due to the way that they took away from the verisimilitude and realism that drew them to the franchise, while looter-shooter fans were put off by the loot mechanics for not only lacking depth but for being totally ignorable for the majority of gameplay.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/YMMV/GhostReconBreakpoint
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