Ubisoft have just announced Ghost Recon Online, a free-to-play multiplayer game in their near-future combat series.

Ubisoft have just announced Ghost Recon Online, a free-to-play multiplayer game in their near-future combat series. I had the chance to play it at their offices in Paris earlier this month, and it’s surprisingly good.

I say ‘surprisingly’ because free-to-play can sometimes mean cheap. Ubisoft have been working on GRO for 2 years, and it feels like a proper shooter – in fact it’s remarkably slick. The visual fidelity is intentionally a notch below stuff like Crysis, to let it run on a wide range of systems, but the movement and shooting are satisfying. It feels to me like the halfway point between Call of Duty and Team Fortress 2: a modern-day military setting, but with classes based around unique and crazy abilities. But unlike either of those games, it’s also cover-based, and stays in third person until you aim down your sights.

You unlock new weapons, upgrades and abilities as you play, but not necessarily for cash. Senior producer Hugues Ricour says “a player that decides to never pay can have the full game and the complete experience. We don’t want a paying user to have a competitive advantage.” You don’t buy weapons earlier than you’d normally earn them, but you can buy consumables like grenades. Ricour says the other stuff you can spend money on includes new uniforms, special ammo, armour boosts and extra inventory space to store this stuff.