Gameplay - Like most of the Tom Clancy games (excluding Splinter Cell), Ghost Recon: Island Thunder is a tactical first-person shooter in which you and a team of soldiers take on various dangerous missions in exotic locales. The Ghost Recon series focuses on field combat, as opposed to its sister series Rainbow Six, which focuses primarily on close-quarters combat. The premise of Island Thunder is quite original, and like all of the Clancy games, is steep in political intrigue. The setting is Cuba in the year 2009. Fidel Castro is dead, and a number of people are tying to take control of Cuba in the ensuing political chaos. The Ghosts, a super-secret Special Forces unit, are sent in to keep order and, perhaps, help skew the power-struggle just a little bit.

The Tom Clancy tactical shooters are known for their extreme realism and micromanagement aspects, and Island Thunder sticks with the program. This is not Return to Castle Wolfenstein or Unreal Championship; if you want to survive, you need to know your tactics and have a good plan before you go in guns-a-blazing. You can only take around 3 shots at most before you die, and shots to the head are always fatal. There are more details and nuances in Island Thunder’s gameplay than your average first-person shooter, too. You have three stances (standing, crouching and prone), and your accuracy fluctuates depending on your stance and the weapon you’re using. The extreme realism does make Ghost Recon a less accessible game for beginners or people that just aren’t into the whole tactical shooter scene, but thanks to a streamlined and efficient interface, it won’t take too long for newbies to get passed the initial learning curve.

In fact, many of the micromanagement aspects that the Tom Clancy shooters are known for can be skipped entirely if you’re just not up for it. Instead of picking every team member and all their gear individually, simply hit the auto-assign button during the setup to have the game do all the tedious stuff for you. Of course, for those who enjoy the tedious stuff, you can still choose the individual gear for all your members, as well as plotting out a detailed plan for your different units to follow out on the field.

Island Thunder certainly controls and plays well, but this game is simply a lot less fun offline. The main reason for this is that the single player missions just aren’t very exciting. Mission objectives are varied enough (ranging from destroying SAM sites to protecting voters), but the missions feel static. There isn’t much interaction with your environments, outside of the occasional machine gun to man, and the story—as interesting as the premise is—is only advanced during short briefings before each mission.

Your AI partners are generally quite adept (they’re excellent marksmen, to the point that you sometimes won’t even get a crack at any enemies before your teammates take them out), but they still do a couple of bonehead maneuvers. The Ghosts are apparently extremely strict to sticking with open-field combat, because none of your teammates knows how to properly breach an entrance and clear a room; they’ll generally stop and block the doorway, which sometimes leads to unnecessary deaths.

Playing online, either cooperatively with some friends through the missions or against other people in some old-fashioned deathmatches, Island Thunder shines. Sure, you’re still playing through the same somewhat static missions, but naturally, they become a lot more exciting when you’re taking them on with some actual humans. You can communicate and improvise new strategies at all times, and just knowing that you got your friend’s back and he’s got yours makes the game fun on a whole other level. Deathmatches are just as exciting, if not more so, as your enemies are now humans too, that (if they’re smart) are also constantly communicating and improvising. The ugly presence of lag has shown itself a few times, mostly during co-op games, but for the most part playing on Xbox Live has been a smooth and utterly entertaining experience.

Graphics - Island Thunder shows its age in the graphical department. While it is certainly put together competently, there’s nothing here that’ll wow you in any way. It’s definitely no where near the quality of Ubi-Soft’s own Splinter Cell, nor is it up to par with the recently released Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield for the PC (which is soon to be ported to the Xbox). Of course, that makes sense since Ghost Recon was originally released nearly two years ago, but it would have been nice if the graphics were updated a bit for this port.

It shouldn’t derail your enjoyment of the game at all, though. The draw distance is immense, which is important in games like this (seeing as in it’s preferable to take out enemies as far away as possible), and the frame-rate is consistently high. There’s still no representation of your gun on-screen, and that’s still kind of lame, but you tend to forget about it when you’re in the heat of combat.

Sound - The sound in Island Thunder is excellent, if a bit sparse. In following with the extreme realism, playing the game is usually a quiet affair with not much breaking the silence except the sounds of your footsteps and the rustling of leaves as you pass through them—which makes for a pretty tense experience. Once the shooting does start, you’ll hear gunshots that sound extremely loud and crisp, but even scarier are the sounds of guns fired towards you, as bullets whiz by and ricochet all around you. There isn’t much music at all in the game, which is probably for the better since, depending on the little music that is there (during the menus mostly), it’s average at best.

 

 

Overall Value - Island Thunder certainly provides plenty to keep you playing, with eight new missions and a dozen of different game types to play them in. Each of the eight new maps can be played online, in addition to four returning maps from the original Ghost Recon. If you ever get tired of what’s already provided out of the box, Ubi Soft has also promised downloadable content in the future. It’s unfortunate, however, that Island Thunder retails at $40 dollars considering it is a port of an expansion pack that itself cost $30 dollars when it was first released. If this game cost $10 dollars less, it’d be much easier to recommend.

To break it down for the three main types of people that would probably be interested in Island Thunder: This is a no-brainer for Ghost Recon veterans who are looking for more of the same. For those who played the first to death and are not still entirely enamored by it, Island Thunder is not an essential purchase, especially when it costs $40 dollars. As for those that missed out on the first game entirely, Island Thunder does offer enough to stand on its own—provided that they plan on spending most of their time online. While it is a technically well-made game, it’s just not as exciting when you’re playing on your own.

 

 

How to install:

1. Extract the folder from the auto-extract zip file.
2. Execute the file SETUP.BAT
3. Create access direct icon to the desktop of file "ghost.exe" & enjoy.

Details:
-The training not works
-Need maybe reduce some details in DirectX (not verified)

Works in windows xp / 98-me

Watch Trailer

Subscene: Search for matching subtitles

Download: Ghost Recon Island Thunder rar