Video Game / Ghost Recon: Future Soldier

"Ghost: In traditional belief, a ghost is a manifestation of the dead.
They remain in the physical realm to avenge, help, or punish the living."

— Ghost Recon: Future Soldier Prologue

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Future Soldier is a Third-Person Shooter video game in the Ghost Recon series, developed and published by Ubisoft with support from Redstorm Entertainment, Ubisoft Paris and Bucharest for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Microsoft Windows in May 2012. The game also included three DLC content, which consists of Arctic Strike, Raven Strike and Khyber Strike.

Future Soldier is the first game in the series to feature the use of drones for scouting and marking enemies. It also includes the Gunsmith customizable weapon system, allowing for extensive customization of the player's weapons (including paint schemes, barrel lengths, trigger types, and even the gas system to determine rate of fire), and more extensive use of co-op features like Sync Shots (an expanded version of Splinter Cell: Conviction's "Mark & Execute").

The game takes place in the year 2024^note The year is indicated via Ghost Recon Breakpoint's Red Patriot DLC content. where a Ghost team is deployed in a special forces op under the command of Joe Ramirez. While investigating a suspicious vehicle convoy, the entire team is killed off when a Dirty Bomb detonated. In response, another Ghost team, known as "Hunter", is tasked to investigate what happened. It's composed of Captain Cedric "Ghost Lead" Ferguson, Staff Sergeant John Kozak (the player character), Master Sergeant Robert "Pepper" Bonifacio, and Sergeant First Class Jimmy "30K" Ellison.

Under the orders of Major Scott Mitchell, Hunter team's work leads them from Bolivia to Zambia, Pakistan up to Russia where they investigate a conspiracy made up of pro-ultranationalist Russians.

There's an Ubisoft-backed short film prequel known as Alpha that gives more background to what happened prior to Future Soldier.

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Tropes found in Future Soldier:

• Actionized Sequel: Future Soldier takes several cues from Splinter Cell: Conviction in retooling the series, such as the sync-shot that resembles Mark & Execute, and the addition of Regenerating Health.
• Air-Vent Passageway: In "Firefly Rain", the team travels through a room with multiple industrial fans to get to a Russian airport hangar. Granted, they don't actually have to crawl except for one brief point, since the fans are pretty huge (being meant to pipe hot air along the airstrip to keep ice off the runway, as Kozak notes), but the point still stands.
• All There in the Manual:
  • After the attack on London, Mitchell makes an odd comment that the nuclear missile was likely the one Team Hunter was searching for a few months prior. This is a reference to the prequel film which ends with Team Hunter losing a nuclear weapon to an unknown group.
  • Mitchell himself is never referred to by name at any point in the game, so you'd only know he's the player character of the previous games if you'd read supplementary material about the game.
• America Saves the Day: Downplayed - Russian loyalists do a lot of the work themselves, with the Ghosts at best tipping the odds in their favor by rescuing the rightful president and a general who can effectively lead the resistance.
• Anyone Can Die:
  • In the prequel film Alpha, a Ghost (Chuck) is suddenly shot in the face while trying to disarm a warhead.
  • The game proper starts off by showing us the first-person death of Joe Ramirez, who's been with the franchise as long as main lead Captain Mitchell and was considered something of The Lancer (also killed is Richard Allen, another long-running Ghost).
• Armor Is Useless: Zig-zagged depending on the mode. In singleplayer, a Raven's Rock combat trooper in full riot gear and a cartel goon in a t-shirt both take the same amount of bullets to bring down, but in multiplayer armor is an unlockable for the Rifleman class that actually lets them survive more bullets, so long as they actually hit the armor.
• Artificial Stupidity: Throw an incendiary grenade into the path of a Shield-Bearing Mook and they'll make no attempt to avoid it, instead marching straight into the thermate cloud and dying a horrible burning death.
• Black Dude Dies First: Played straight in the prequel film Alpha, where Chuck, the one black Ghost shown, is the one to die - the film even makes it more apparent by featuring Pepper and 30K from the game, but using an entirely different, unnamed white Ghost Lead instead of the black guy who leads the squad in the actual game. The game itself, however, has a notable aversion with Ghost Lead, who throws out literally every death card related to this trope in the intro to the penultimate mission - sent off on a dangerous, obviously-final mission, calls his son beforehand, talks to him about his birthday and promises to be back soon, he even jokes about retiring soon in the cutscene to the mission before that - but still survives to the end, even with one more mission coming after that where they have to take care of the last remnants of the coup.
• Borrowed Biometric Bypass: One level requires the player to pass a retinal scanner which can't be hacked open. Downplayed in that Kozak doesn't actually kill an enemy soldier to get the bypass, hes just sneaks up on a lone guard and manhandles them into using it, then knocks them out.
• Brick Joke: Halfway through the fifth mission, the group has to ride an elevator up from their first objective to move on to the second. 30K complains, to which Pepper notes "at least it's not stairs". Come the eleventh mission, where the first objective is to sneak past a group of enemies guarding the entrance to a building... and then they have to get to the roof. By way of a lot of stairs. 30K complains again, to which Pepper agrees.
• Car Fu: In Alpha, the enemy Spider Tank is defeated when Ghost Leader rams it into the water using an Awesome Personnel Carrier.
• Canon Immigrant: The non-lethal flash bulb sidearms utilized in multiplayer in this game were first used by John Clark and Ding Chavez in the Jack Ryan novel Debt of Honor.
• Competence Porn: The game could essentially be summarized as "stone-cold and extremely put together badasses stop a coup in Russia, and then allow the Russians to take credit for it with nary a flinch".
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Ends up working in the player's favor. Human players are the only ones that can be detected - so long as you yourself remain hidden from the enemy, AI squadmates (including temporary escortees) will never be detected by patrolling enemies, even when running full-tilt right past them (also keeping active camo up in this case, which the player can't do). They will also rarely (if ever) get downed by enemy fire (even if this is partly because the enemy simply never targets them), have ridiculously good aim, will never lose track of marked targets once locked on (albeit with some limits in how far they're willing to move from one position to one that will give them a shot on a marked target), will shoot them the instant you give the order or shoot your marked target, and in some cases can shoot through walls no matter how thick they are to get at said marked targets if they pass behind buildings. When playing through the main campaign, having flesh-and-blood teammates is a liability rather than an asset, and at least one challenge in the game relies on simply marking targets through a drone for the AI to take care of while you stay behind cover; the only concrete advantages a human player gets is that it's easier to deliberately pull off a One-Hit Polykill with a sync-shot or take advantage of the Bullet Time that occurs after a full sync shot, and human players will make more of an effort to get a good angle to shoot marked targets.
• Concealment Equals Cover: Zigzagged. While most cover provides total protection from gunfire, thinner cover can be penetrated by gunfire, shotguns and submachine guns providing the least penetration while sniper rifles and machine guns allow further. Both parts of the trope can also be averted, as you can shoot through even thicker surfaces by loading armor piercing rounds into your gun, and you can also use a backscatter optic or magnetic vision to see through it.
• Critical Existence Failure: Kozak and the other Ghosts can fight unimpeded until they take enough bullets to be incapacitated. Once they're down, if nobody comes to revive them quickly enough or the rest of the team also gets incapacitated, they will immediately drop dead. That said, it's also possible for enemies to put incapped teammates down instead of waiting for them to bleed out.
• Cruel and Unusual Death:
  • Not only is an entire Ghost team killed off via a dirty bomb explosion in the prologue mission, but you get to see the flesh on Ramirez's arms burning off just before he falls off a cliff, in first-person!
  • Later on, we see random London citizens getting sliced and stabbed by falling glass shards.
• Cutting Off the Branches: In a sense; Mitchell's comment that "our unit's never been hit this hard before" after the prologue, where they lose a team of four people, carries the implication that the "canon" for the original game and its expansions involved the player never losing more than one or two soldiers.
• Elite Mooks: The Ghosts tangle with the Bodarks ("Werewolves"), a Russian Spetsnaz unit that was raised to operate like the Ghosts on special forces missions. They show up semi-frequently in the final levels of the game, make up the enemies for the final ten waves of a map in Guerrilla mode, and are the faction opposing the Ghosts in competitive multiplayer.
• Empty Quiver: The introduction to one level involves a nuclear missile launched from Russia towards London, without the Russian government's authorization. The actual warhead was destroyed by an anti-nuke missile shield, but the delivery system still impacts a skyscraper and ultimately kills a bunch of people.
• Escort Mission: One mission has you "escort" the AI-controlled quadruped Warhound. Only, it's invincible against everything the enemy tries to throw at it, and comes with its own mortar and missile system. Guess what does most of the killing in that mission? Later missions have more traditional escort missions to protect and extract the sole survivor of a Georgian spec-ops team and then the incarcerated President of Russia; for the purposes of the game they're essentially treated as an extra member of your squad, with all the benefits your AI teammates get, including invulnerability outside of cutscenes (though both take a hit during a cutscene) and being undetectable until you yourself get spotted.
• Exact Words: At the end of game, the Ghosts shoot the final leader of Raven's Rock, and are about to kill him to get vengeance for the Ghosts killed in the opening mission, but are suddenly stopped by orders from "the highest level" not to kill him (the implication being that Command wants the guy to survive due to his political clout). Instead, the Ghosts leave the wounded guy on a train track to be run over by an incoming train; as he demands they save him and take him into custody, Ghost Lead quips "our orders were not to touch you" as the guy is run over. It's all very Batman Begins.
• Faceless Mooks: The Raven's Rock infantry all wear balaclavas. Russian regulars don't wear masks, though.
• Gas Mask Mooks: The Bodarks all wear gas masks.
• Goggles Do Something Unusual: The shades the Ghosts wear enable the augmented reality Diegetic Interface, which also includes options of combined thermal imaging and night vision or backscatter X-ray vision.
• Gunship Rescue: This happens quite few times, where your team gets dug out of various scrapes by minigun-armed choppers or by fixed wing fighter-bombers. The first such case happens in response to the enemy calling in one of their own gunships, even.
• Harder Than Hard: Patches for the PC version introduced "Hardcore Mode", which changes up the mechanics to make the game more difficult - enemy weapons are even deadlier than before, cross-com goodies like sensor grenades only last a couple of seconds, and adaptive camo is changed to work like in multiplayer, where any movement deactivates it.
• Hold the Line: In addition to the occasional defense objective, Future Soldier includes "Guerrilla Mode", which is essentially this game's answer to Horde mode. The player is tasked to infiltrate an enemy HQ and then hold it against increasing waves of bad guys. Every tenth wave is a "boss" wave with even more enemies who bring along a few new toys, like minigun turrets and Hind gunships; beat that wave, the HQ is relocated to a different spot on the map and the whole cycle repeats with slightly stronger enemies.
• Hollywood Silencer: Nobody will notice a silenced gunshot no matter how close, so long as you kill in one shot and your target's buddies aren't able to see his body drop or come across it before it fades on their patrol. If you don't make that one-shot kill, though, you're generally going to get detected - if you missed, he'll notice the bullet whizzing past him or hitting a nearby wall and try to alert his comrades. Take more than one bullet to kill him and his buddies will usually hear him screaming in pain and investigate, at which point they're likely going to notice the body, unless you can also kill them before that without anyone else seeing.
• 100% Completion: Every mission includes four Challenges, one Weapon and three Tactical. Completing the mission's Weapon Challenge unlocks a new weapon of the type you used for the challenge (e.g. unlocking a new shotgun by making three kills within three seconds with three shots from a shotgun), while completing all three Tactical Challenges unlocks a new attachment to put on your weapons. There are also separate campaign-wide challenges, one that unlocks a new weapon or camo pattern per mission if you completed the mission with a Ghost score of at least 60, and another that unlocks a special grenade launcher for completing the entire campaign on Elite difficulty.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: Recruit, Veteran, and Elite. The higher the difficulty, the less damage the player can take before being incapacitated or killed, the fewer times they'll be incapped rather than outright killed in this case (from about five times on Recruit, to three on Veteran, to only once in very lucky circumstances on Elite), and the higher bonus they get to their Ghost score at the end of the mission.
• Interface Screw: During the Dagestan mission, there's periodic interference to the HUD and AR system the Ghosts use, ranging from blurring and static, to false readings of enemies. Eventually, Mitchell has the system taken offline for debugging, forcing the player to go with nothing but the magnetic goggles for the rest of the level. The first of the Raven Strike DLC levels is set immediately afterwards, and forces you to go through the entire level without any of the cross-com gadgets while they work on figuring out why it was screwing up.
• Invisibility Cloak: The second mission introduces the adaptive camo. It only works when stationary, crouched or prone - no sprinting unless using the cover-shift when not in combat - and suffers from Invisibility Flicker. Multiplayer only gives it to Scouts and changes it so they can't move at all without deactivating it; the Hardcore mode in the PC version with the last patch also makes it only work while completely stationary.
• Just Plane Wrong: The cargo planes seen in the Russian airbase during the sixth mission have cabin windows, which only appear on passenger plane in real life.
• Kick the Dog:
  • In the second mission, the enemy soldiers will frequently harass random civilians; your first kill in the level is someone who had just tried to sexually assault a woman then grabbed his gun to try and shoot her when she pushed him away and ran. The third mission likewise starts with the PMC mooks killing civilians; it's mentioned in the cutscene at the start of the next mission that that sight particularly got to Kozak.
  • In the final mission, the first two Raven's Rock leaders can be found performing various dirty deeds (assaulting their wife or secretary, executing a P.O.W.) before you assassinate them.
• Made of Explodium: You encounter some technicals with machine guns in the first two levels. When you kill their gunners - not even touching the vehicle proper, thus disqualifying this from Every Car Is a Pinto - the vehicle promptly explodes for no reason.
• Murder by Inaction: At the end of the game, the team has the leader of Raven's Rock cornered on a train track but they can't kill him because the US government wants to bring him in alive. Before they can do that, however, they hear a train approaching. The coup leader begs for them to save him, but Ghost Lead simply walks away, saying "our orders were not to touch you."
• No-Gear Level: The first time you encounter the Bodarks, they hack your cross-com system, forcing you to play through most of the level without your HUD or gadgets (somehow also losing your ability to throw grenades for some reason). This goes so far as to even take away the red haze that normally tells you you've taken damage and are about to be downed - but, also oddly, not the indicator that an RPG is going to be fired on your position.
• Non-Uniform Uniform: The Ghosts wear all sorts of clothing, with hardly a piece of American uniform seen... which makes sense when it's recalled that they're on black ops, and the US will disavow them if they're captured or killed.
• No Scope: Like GRAW, the game allow you to aim a sniper rifle without going into scope view.
• Nuclear Nullifier: The SLAMS anti-nuke missile shield from EndWar gets a mention here, but it's confirmed that it only nullifies the warheads without being able to do anything about the delivery system, as demonstrated when a nukeless missile still causes significant damage to London, taking out the upper floors of a couple skyscrapers and shredding the populace below with glass shards.
• Optional Stealth: Higher scores are offered for sync-shots, neck-snaps, and stealth kills, but they're not necessary except for a few short no-alarm segments, and in fact you don't get anything other than an achievement for scoring higher than 60 in a level. And even then, unsuppressed weapons can be used stealthily by ensuring no one is left alive to sound the alarm. There's also the fact that total stealth docks points, as the score counter only accounts for enemies killed in stealthy manners and not those who you manage to sneak past.
• Private Military Contractors: Hunter team confronts "Watchgate" contractors in Nigeria, who are holding CIA SAD operator Daniel Sykes as a prisoner. It's noted that they're surprisingly well-connected for what should be a small-time PMC who by Sykes' admission don't even really know what they're getting themselves into, as the back half of the mission includes you having to deal with two Hind gunships under their control.
• Production Foreshadowing: While fighting off a large force of Russian military in the penultimate mission, Pepper compares the team's situation to the two outlaws who died fighting the entire Mexican army. Kozak promptly corrects him by pointing out it was the Bolivian army. Guess where the Ghosts are sent in the next game?
• Product Placement: While in a Nigerian village, there is a wall with nothing on it but a large UnderArmor poster right behind an ammo cache, directly in the player's line of sight in normal gameplay. There is no explanation as to why there is an ad for an American sports clothing brand in the middle of a sparsely inhabited area of the Nigerian countryside.
• Regenerating Health: Like Rainbow Six: Vegas, you can survive less hits than, say, Halo, especially on higher difficulties, and health regenerates slower than in most other shooters, but it's still reasonably quick.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: The game has the SRR, which is a revolving-action, silenced sniper rifle. You can even detach the stock and turn it into a true (if somewhat large) revolver. There's also the MTs-255 revolver-shotgun, with multiplayer including the Taurus Judge, Chiappa Rhino, and MP-412 REX.
• Second Hour Superpower: The adaptive camo is introduced in the second mission, and the unmanned drone in the third.
• Shadow Government: The Ghosts tangle with Raven's Rock, an ex-Russian black ops unit turned arms smuggling group that has ties with Russian ultranationalists. They're the ones really in charge of Russia after influencing the coup against the legitimate government during the game.
• Shield-Bearing Mook: One of the special enemy types encountered in this game is a Raven's Rock soldier in full riot gear and wielding a bulletproof ballistic shield as well as a submachine gun. Like the Bodark Elite Mooks, they're a lot more dangerous than regular troops due to their shield, but can be dealt with more easily with the right gear, including grenades.
• Short-Range Shotgun: Shotguns are only consistently instantly-lethal up to about ten meters, though modifications can make it better or worse. A long barrel and scope will increase its effective range enough to make it somewhat viable for most missions; in turn, a shorter barrel and Dragon's Breath shells will reduce the effective range even further. A Let's Play of the game, in which viewers were allowed to suggest what weapons the players used, ended up having nearly fifteen minutes' worth of footage for a failure reel in one specific part of the 10th mission because the viewpoint player used the MTs-255 with a short barrel, Dragon's Breath ammo, and its unique spread-increasing flash hider, which resulted in a shotgun with a crosshair as big as the screen itself which they dubbed^note at first affectionately, but then derisively after they actually had to use it the "tactical blunderbuss◊".
• Shout-Out:
  • In the "Invisible Bear" mission, one part has you going up a few flights of stairs. Kozak comments that he's expecting barrels to come rolling down. Later on in the mission during a protracted firefight, 30K makes reference to "that movie with the two cowboys and the Mexican army"^note "Pretty sure it's the Bolivian army!", asking if anyone else remembers how that one ends.
  • There are a few to Modern Warfare, the biggest of which is the player's squad going by the callsign of "Hunter" and receiving orders from "Overlord".
  • If the game crashes, the alert sound from Metal Gear Solid will play.
• Sniper Pistol: The 45T pistol can score headshots at a pretty impressive range in the hands of a skilled player, despite its listed range stat being shorter than all the shotguns.
• Spider Tank:
  • One of these shows up in Alpha, armed with a Gatling.
  • One mission has the Warhound, which carries a mortar and missile launcher.
• Static Stun Gun: An optional sidearm (or underbarrel attachment) in multiplayer, which can be used for non-lethal takedowns in order to hack enemy players.
• Stealth-Based Mission: A few missions in this game have segments where the player must avoid raising the alarms.
• Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome: Long-time Ghosts Ramirez and Allen in the opening mission.
• Suspicious Video-Game Generosity: One part of the second-to-last mission has the player take on an APC. If the player doesn't have an assault rifle with an under-barrel grenade launcher, a weapons crate holding an AK-47 equipped with a grenade launcher will be marked on your HUD.
• Take Cover!: The game utilizes a cover system. Players can vault over cover or sprint between cover as needed.
• Trick Bullet: Sniper rifles can be equipped with "Exacto Ammo", which can lock onto targets while scoped in and will redirect themselves mid-flight to nail an enemy in the head. To make up for the fact that it absolutely will hit once it's locked on, it takes a while to actually acquire lock (though this can be shortened if the enemy is marked on the cross-com, such as with a sensor) and the guidance system weakens the bullet, so unguided shots below the head deal less damage and it doesn't penetrate cover as well as regular bullets.
• Video Game Caring Potential: The second mission involves the Ghosts hunting down a warlord who has taken over a refugee camp. You get Challenges to avoid civilian casualties and kill every last one of the warlord's mooks terrorizing the people.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Incendiary ammo is an optional armament for machine guns and shotguns; they do less damage than standard FMJ rounds in exchange for delivering damage over time, which is rather a moot point for shotguns, which often kill in one shot at close range. The only real reason to use it with a shotgun is to watch your victim fall to the ground screaming as the ammo burns him alive inside out. Sniper rifles get Raufoss ammo instead, which exchanges cover-penetration ability for outright exploding upon hitting someone.
• Villainous Breakdown: In the penultimate mission, the president of the Raven's Rock regime gives two press conferences between mission segments. He's calm and self-assured in the first, but angry and desperate in the second as the Ghosts continue to whittle away Raven's Rock forces.