Ghost Recon: Future Soldier

Mobile games aren't always renowned for their innovations, but Ghost Recon: Future Soldier - the pocket-sized version of Ubisoft's recently released tactical FPS - actually has a few interesting ideas up its sleeve.

While it abandons the first-person perspective of its bigger console-based brother, replacing it with decent enough third-person sprites, it still offers some tactically minded - if a little clumsy - shooting action.

Tactical stealth action

The game casts you as a member of the titular Ghost Recon team, a group of highly trained soldiers with access to the best weaponry that government budgets can buy. It's your job to put down an insurrection and save the world.

You control your Ghost with a floating D-pad and a context-sensitive action button. It's not an ideal system, and you'll often find yourself walking straight into enemy fire when what you really wanted to do was duck into cover.

The shooting is surprisingly robust, and a clever targeting system lets you take out enemies that aren't alerted to your presence with a single shot. You have plenty of gadgets at your disposal, too, with the helicopter drone and the active camouflage from the console version putting in appearances.

Despite the cartoon graphics, there's a good deal of bloody violence - as you'd expect from a game about elite soldiers. Ghost Recon: Future Soldier never shies away from exploding heads or murdered civilians.

Duck and cover

The backgrounds you lead your Ghost through are detailed and busy, and the overall package is of a particularly high quality, with an impressive digital score tracing your every move.

The aforementioned control issues are Ghost Recon: Future Soldier's only real problem. In the shooting sections they're annoying, but when you're trying to stealthily sneak past a group of guards and you stumble straight into one of them you're liable to bite your tongue off.

You can usually shoot your way out of the trouble the D-pad causes, but it breaks the immersion, and ruins the good work done by the rest of the game.

Ghost Recon: Future Soldier is a fun little shooter that makes some sensible concessions for the hardware it finds itself on. The problem is, when it makes mistakes they're big enough to make you want to stop playing.

Ghost Recon: Future Soldier

Full of action and interesting ideas, Ghost Recon: Future Soldier is let down by its touchscreen controls
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.