Game Spotlight: Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars 3D

At first, I was pretty bummed out about the Australian launch line-up for the 3DS, however I did get one game that I think has made getting a 3DS at launch worth it…

I’m not really a big fan of the Tom Clancy series of games released by Ubisoft, and to be honest this is the first Ghost Recon game I’ve ever played. That said, I do realise that Shadow Wars (with “3D” attached to the end for the Australian release for some reason…) isn’t like other Ghost Recon games. Instead, it is a tactical role-playing game more along the lines of Nintendo’s Advance Wars or Fire Emblem… which is great for me since I’m a pretty big fan of both of those series.

Shadow Wars started out its development life as a standard Nintendo DS game before jumping ship over to the 3DS, so it’s not exactly a “pure” 3DS game. This means it doesn’t really take full advantage of any of the new features found on the 3DS such as StreetPass… but it really doesn’t need to. What it does do very well is show off the 3D capabilities of the top screen, though maybe not as dynamically as Ridge Racer or Street Fight IV.

It may not be best example of what the 3DS can do, but it is still a very solid game that deserves recognition for that alone. Fans of X-COM will be glad to hear that Shadow Wars was headed up by X-COM creator, Julian Gollop, and his influence is seen throughout the game with different levels of terrain and other small touches that you’d find from X-COM. Of course, to be honest, I felt this game reminded me more of Advance Wars and Fire Emblem (with maybe a sprinkling of Valkyria Chronicles) than anything else.

Here’s a 9 minute gameplay walkthrough presented by Julian Gollop which pretty much highlights everything you need to know about the gameplay of Shadow Wars.

All in all, this is a perfect portable game that you can play on the go and features excellent gameplay. It makes me glad that I picked up a 3DS at launch despite it not taking complete advantage of the systems capabilities. As for the Hardware Spotlight for the 3DS itself, I’ll have that posted up later this month…