How must a best-selling author of political thrillers feel to have his name attached to a game whose dialogue is atrocious? Does Tom Clancy even know this is happening? There have been games featuring his name before, so maybe he views “Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars” as just another payday courtesy of the booming video game industry. But at a time in his career when his books have “Tom Clancy’s” on their cover more often than “Tom Clancy” — that is, they’re essentially creator-approved fan fiction — he should have time to intervene in the release of a game whose script might have kept it from earning the Official Nintendo Seal of Quality back in the days of the Nintendo Entertainment System, when even laughable translations from Japanese got the green light.
When you’re not suffering through ethnic stereotypes and inanities spoken by Soviets dressed in gray cloaks they must have stolen off their founder when viewing his preserved body on a tour of the Lenin Mausoleum, you spend your time with “Shadow Wars” in turn-based combat with bad guys on grids. It’s kind of like the medieval-set “Fire Emblem,” with machine gunners replacing swordsmen and snipers replacing archers, except for one big difference: In “Fire Emblem,” it makes sense that a sword clanging against someone’s armor wouldn’t necessarily kill them, but usually drain their health to a range where one or two more attacks would finish them off; in “Shadow Wars,” when someone is blasted at close range with a machine gun — or even a missile launcher! — and just loses a fraction of his health, it’s absurd.
The excellent “Advance Wars” successfully brought this wonderful, chesslike genre into modern times by making each unit — that is, each piece taking up one space on the battlefield grid — a group of soldiers, planes, etc. This way, a 30 percent loss of a unit’s health could be represented by three of 10 soldiers dying, achieving the same practical effect as a flurry of bullets knocking out 30 percent of one soldier’s health, but without looking ridiculous.
| SSLqTom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars’ |
| » System: 3DS |
| » Price: $39.99 |
| » Rating: 2 out of 5 stars |
Adding to “Shadow Wars’ ” odd presentation is the fact that for much of the game, the 3-D seems to only have two settings — on or off — rendering useless the 3-D slider Nintendo built into the side of its amazing 3-D-without-glasses hand-held gaming system.
The game isn’t all bad — a few unit types, like one that’s invisible unless an enemy moves to an adjacent square, bring to mind the classic board game Stratego — but its many quirks are puzzling considering how many great entries in this genre “Shadow Wars” had to draw on.
If you insist on using your 3DS to play a tactics game set in modern times, take advantage of the system’s ability to play regular DS games, and go get “Advance Wars: Dual Strike.”
