A social game that has some appeal for mainstream players

May 25, 2012 22:41 GMT  ·  By

Publisher Ubisoft seems to have succumbed to the trend towards turning all big franchises over to social gaming and the current result is a Facebook-based title linked to its third-person shooter franchise, called Ghost Recon Commander.

The Facebook title is clearly designed to enhance brand knowledge and promote Future Soldier rather than simply deliver a compelling experience on its own, but the game might actually be worth playing for fans of the Ghost Recon universe and its mechanics.

Players can choose from three classes and then recruit their friends or use pre-made characters in their three-man team in order to finish a number of missions, some of them harder than they look at first sight.

The biggest annoyance during the missions is having to hunt the various bonuses around the screen in order to get all the potential bonuses.

It adds nothing to the actual gameplay and the development team would have better served the player by making collection automatic.

After each mission, both the health and the ammo of the player character replenish rather slowly and the only way to speed it up is to use Skulls, which are the in-game currency and can only be acquired with Facebook credits, to top them off before heading to a new adventure.

The Skulls and the money gamers get from missions can also be used to get items for the character, including new weapons and armor, to build a number of base buildings that also improve statistics or get cosmetic enhancements.

The big problem so far is that the missions tend to yield pretty modest rewards and Ghost Recon Commander pretty much forces a player who really wants to get into the game to use real-world money to keep playing at a steady pace.

In traditional social game fashion, Ghost Recon Commander also tends to push the player towards recruiting as many of his friends as possible to the game, in order to get access to more teammates to use during missions.