Ghost Recon: Future Soldier was an interesting release, when it originally came out. It gave me a good appreciation of FPS games, and the game mechanics it employed in the campaign mode made it feel more like a team effort when I was just playing with the AI. So when I was asked to check out the Raven Strike DLC, I tried to not get my expectations too high, though I expected something great. Was it great? Click here for the original review of Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, for the review of The Ghost Recon Raven Strike DLC, click on through…

The Raven Strike DLC is comprised of three campaign missions that deal with this story. There are names referenced from the game’s regular campaign, that you may recognize, and it makes you feel like you’re prepared and know what you’re getting into. As it turns out, you’re not really prepared for what you’re getting into, because these missions are crazy! I’m not going to talk about the story too much, as I don’t want to spoil anything at all for you, and really it’s a decent story to play through. I’ll just say that it deals with Raven Rock, and spying. Who’s spying? Well, when you get to the story you’ll find out.

Let me just say, I went through this DLC pack on veteran, and it was hard. I have no clue what the difficulty is on Elite, but my guess is it’ll be a 20 hour game on Elite due to the immense difficulty I was confronted with on veteran. The first mission, gameplay wise, is very basic. They even tell you at the beginning, you’re going in with the basics, nothing fancy, just some frags and your guns. It’s a very stealthy mission, taking place in what looks like a swamp, no alerts allowed kind of mission. It becomes clear very quickly that the chances of getting seen, and the chances of dead body’s being found are very good. This mission is all about staying undercover, not getting seen, and taking everyone out while doing so. This is the closest thing to a ninja mission that I’ve ever seen in the game. The final battle is a massive cluster of snipers, gunfire, and helicopters. This first mission is a great setup for the story to come.

The second mission, while still about stealth, focuses more on clearing the way before making any forward progression. You’re in a farming area, during the day, which makes the stealth a little hard to do. You also have access to more equipment than in the previous mission. The variable that occurs in this mission is that at a certain point, enemy helicopters begin to fly overhead. This makes the mission extremely difficult, and I can’t tell you how many times i had to start from the checkpoint before this starts happening. Chalk it up to stupid mistakes, or bad strategy, but if you’re like me, prepare to be stuck in this area of the mission for a while. Once you get past this little stealth part of mission 2, you’ll be put into a crazy gun fight with enemies, which is fun, but also makes you have to have a strategy as well. A lot of the firefights make you need a strategy, because without a strategy, you’ll either be having your teammates do all your work, or you’ll be restarting from the last checkpoint due to death.

Once you get into the third mission, while the stealth is still a factor, you’re pretty much thrown into a cluster mess of a fight at the beginning of the mission. A destroyed city somewhere in Russia, in the middle of explosions and a war, your mission is to kill 4 Bodark officers. Of course, there’s not just 4 guys, there’s a lot of enemies, a lot of firepower, and a lot of stuff blowing up. If you didn’t like the stealth of the other missions and just wanted to get into a massive orgy of explosions, this is the mission where you get your chance.

A few things I didn’t like about our advanced download of this DLC pack are the glitches. A few glitches went down here and there that messed with me on completing certain missions. A simple restart from previous checkpoint fixed it for the most part, but sometimes I had to restart the whole mission. Another thing I didn’t really like, and again I’m not trying to spoil anything about the story, but after the last mission, there’s no story summary, it just takes you back to the start screen. I don’t know if you’re just supposed to assume things ended a certain way because you did your objectives or maybe I missed something and didn’t get an ending because of that. The lack of some kind of summary kind of kills the whole DLC pack for me, because it’s a decent story.

Overall, the DLC is a good companion piece to the game’s original campaign. If you’re into the game mechanics and strategy of playing the campaign’s this will be a good buy for you. However, if you weren’t a big fan of the campaign in the first place and just stuck to the multiplayer games, you might not be into this DLC pack at all. It’s a fun story, that’s paced nicely and gives you new reasons to dislike the Russians in the game.

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