YMMV / Ghost Recon

• Awesome Music: The main theme. Especially at the 35 second mark.
• Evil Is Cool: The intro video for Desert Siege on PC makes Colonel Wolde look pretty badass for a baddie.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Georgia being invaded by Russian forces backed by ultra-nationalists... in the far-off date of 2008 becomes even more disturbing once you consider the Ossetia conflict and subsequent Russian invasion of Georgia... which also happened in 2008.
  • Russia launching a mass scale invasion to conquer and occupy former Soviet republics. Sounds an awful lot like the invasion of Ukraine since early 2022 (even though no mission of the game took place in Ukraine, the country is mentioned as being occupied in the backstory). A lot of the weapons and armored vehicles of Soviet design used in the conflict are still the same. Arguably slips into Hilarious in Hindsight as the invasion hasn't gone too well for Russia, which managed to hold comparatively less Ukrainian territory (compared to the whole being occupied in the game) and lost some of the larger cities they were able to grab, all with zero NATO intervention outside of providing weapons, training and intel to Ukraine.
  • Seeing bombed-out Vilnius (Lithuania) hits harder still, since Russians have leveled entire Ukrainian cities (such as Mariupol, Bakhmut and Avdiivka).
  • The game's war is kicked off by an ultra-nationalist/neo-imperialist faction that overthrew Vladimir Putin. The above-mentioned Real Life wars were kicked off by Putin himself, clearly out of neo-imperialist goals and using a quite bellicist Russian nationalism to bolster them.
• Moment of Awesome:
  • In the first game, if you destroy an enemy tank, artillery piece, or APC/IFV with a rocket launcher (or if it is destroyed by a friendly tank), you'll hear the muffled voices of the crew inside screaming to death, making the kill extremely satisfying. On the flip-side, if a friendly tank is destroyed, you'll hear muffled screaming as well, making it a bit scary.
  • In the first game, seeing a friendly M1 Abrams tank destroy an enemy APC or tank with its main gun is quite satisfying, especially in the Vilnius mission where they can be quite a pain.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The first minute of "Anthem" sounds suspiciously like this track from Air Force One.

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