Ghost Recon Future Soldier Arctic Strike DLC Review

Arctic Strike is Ghost Recon Future Soldier's first DLC and aims to satisfy the multiplayer crowd with new maps and more....

Here's the content breakdown for Arctic Strike.

• Three new multiplayer maps
  
• New Gametype "Stockade"
• One new Guerilla co-op map
• 6 New weapons
• New Achievements
• Level Cap increase +10
  

Arctic Strike is available for 800 Microsoft points on Xbox Live or £7.99 on the PlayStation Network and downloads at just over 400Mb.

Read on for our Ghost Recon Future Soldier Arctic Strike review...

Arctic Strike takes its name from the new Guerilla map, Arctic Base. It's a beautiful blizzard of action featuring an arctic outstation and smaller outstations with roving patrols and high point spotters peering though the snow to take you out the moment you carelessly break cover. Playing co-op it is feasible to split the team in two and have two guys defend the arctic base and the other two go off in search of the bad guys. The usual rules apply though, only 20 seconds of enemy infiltration and it's game over, so don't wander too far.

It's a shame this is the only arctic map in Arctic Strike, but the other locations are just as cold, even if they are now snow-scapes.

Each of the new adversarial maps have a more open feeling than most of the stock Future Soldier maps, a design decision based on player feedback.

Skyline as the name implies, takes you to the roof of a massive building for a high level firefight, known in some trades as Working at Hieght. Don't be fooled into thinking a roof map is going to be small, skyline is actually quite a large map. The action is also not restricted to the horizontal, but I'll leave that little surprise to your first game. To stay working and not become another statistic, you're going to have to use the rooftop skyline cover well, and this means dodging from solar panel to duct, rinse and repeat. There are some neat hold up locations though that are fun to take control of and pick off the other team from.

Riot takes you back to ground level, to the streets of Russia. The naming becomes clear as you take your squad through the battle torn streets, filled with wrecked cars, trams and obvious bomb damage. A hint for tram lovers, these trams are fitted with bullet proof glass, use them to your advantage.

Evicted is a residential run around with the action taking place around a layout of high rise apartments, again with lots of cover to take advatage of, especially for Future Soldier gamers that have mastered the peek and shoot cover technique. Call of Duty has a similar map based around a residential complex, but Evicted is bigger, far bigger, so big infact it is, surprisingly, a good map for snipers. Engineers will prefer to dodge in and out of the warehouses and garages, to get their trigger happy fix.

All of the maps in Arctic Strike have one thing in common, they are not in the arctic. But that aside they have something else in common, they are huge. Skyline, Riot and Evicted can either be fast action or slow pace, it purely depends on the number of players on the server. We found that to get the best experience playing on a server that is maxed out with 12 players is best, by far.

The new game mode that comes with Arctic Strike is Stockade, so called because that's exactly where you will end up when you manage to find one of the other teams bullets. Yes, rather than respawning back into the action, you'll be held in a queue in the virtual stockade until your team manages to score, at which point you are back on team. This puts pressure on your team to get you back into the action, and does have the unfortunate effect of keeping you out of the game if your team is not doing so well. For this reason it is best played with tactical squads, and not randoms. Taking an objective has the satisfying game changing result of bringing your entire team back into action by emptying the stockage queue. However, if you all end up in the stockade, it's game over Ghosts.

Download Arctic Strike DLC for the Xbox here [800 points, 450Mb]

Also make sure and check out our Raven Strike review and Khyber Strike DLC reviews.