Note: This Review is for the Early Access version of Ground Branch, from its most current build as of February 2025.
A project envisioned back in 2007, Ground Branch is a project that has a goal as precise and single-minded as its weaponry: to deliver the most thorough, tactical inheritor to the classic Rainbow Six games, most especially Rainbow Six: Vegas1 series, before that series deviated from their “grounded” origin with Rainbow Six Siege2. And, in that vision, the team at BlackFoot Studios has managed to — under the leadership of original Rainbow Six3 veteran John Sonedecker — create a game that not only recreates the tactical feel of those games, but exceeds even the exquisite operator feel of those titles. In so doing, however, it has not (yet) found a way to meet the aesthetic and pseudo-narrative thrill that those games brought.
At the core of what works is the guns, which are given such character and so thoroughly recreated that they may as well take the role of your player character (instead of the bland-faced, identical characters themselves). The commitment to weapon-accurate portrayals of not only every weapon, but also every rail point and attachment, is, frankly, Ground Branch‘s greatest achievement, and what sets it apart.
Games, from the newest Ghost Recon4 games to Borderlands5, going back decades, have touted weapon customization as a selling point. But — in keeping with the obsession with numbers and quantification — this almost always just amounts to entirely new ways of using a weapon at best and simple numeric stat changes at worst. Consider countless examples, from Call of Duty6 and Ready or Not7. In short, there is little personality in most games’ gun customization (with the exception of World of Guns8, which has no gameplay to back it up).
This is not so in Ground Branch, where your attachments matter as attachments. Where different weapons are made for different situations, and different attachments are made to prepare for even more specific scenarios. A laser dot on an ACOG-bearing rifle does not provide a +6 bonus to hip-fire accuracy, it paints your weapon’s exact bearing for clearing corners without needing the obstruction of the large ACOG sight. Adding an IR pointer serves no purpose for daytime operations in the well-lit jungle, but is invaluable during a daring nighttime raid. The purpose of a secondary red-dot sight (perhaps placed on an angled rail or atop a variable scope) will change depending on the weapon’s function and the player’s preferences, enabling truly unique weapon combinations that feel both tactically realistic (as far as a video game can) and truly personal.
Of course, all of this weapon customization only works because of how fluid the systems are for utilizing this customization, and the game features quick, HUD-minimal ways to change scopes, alter zooms, hold the weapon in different ways, and so on, giving you unparalleled control over how you express your weapon in the field.
And I want to highlight the word express, because that is what you do in Ground Breach. You take your customized weapon, as a stand-in for a customized player, and express yourself through it, altering both the loadout and your favored settings and operations so that you engage with the game in your ideal tactical method. This is, in essence, the core of player expression, found within the complicated and dense systems of a shooter game whose subgenre is not known for agency or expression.
I’ve played Ground Branch for nearly 30 hours, almost all of which single-player (despite the clear intentions of the game, even), and in that I have found myself able to find more ways to express myself than in the vast majority of level-based shooters that offer dozens of progression paths and unique abilities, and all that in only the guns.
Unfortunately, the entire game is not nearly as expressive as it enables the player to be. For starters, the depth of customization that makes the guns feel so rich and lively is not inherited by the games’ other customization (or even by all the game’s guns). There are no character-specific attributes to modify (aside from Encumbrance, which seems to do little), few choices in other gear, and even a lack of appearance customization, not to mention that there are only certain guns — that is, assault rifles and DMRs with rail systems — that truly let the player utilize the full gamut of customization on ofter.
Whether this is to keep with the tactical nature of play, to ensure that all of the game’s player characters operate with more-or-less the same competency and limited abilities, or simply because the developers have not got around to adding the system for role-specific abilities yet, it hampers expression by preventing it from going beyond the gun system.
Similarly, while the visceral presentation of Ground Branch is impeccable — allow for some of the tightest and most precise operations I’ve seen in games — the aesthetic and narrative presentation is lacking even within the genre.
To touch on the downsides first, what I mean by this is that Ground Branch does not lack a potential narrative, but actively works to avoid the one that it naturally should have. To contrast, in every Rainbow Six game — even Siege — the Rainbow Six task force and the changing roster of terroristic enemies both have goals, methods, and style. Rainbow Six operators look, fittingly, like elite soldiers armed with specialized equipment, and their adversaries wear anything from civilian to militia attire and wield standard-issue weapons while guarding key points.
Even without including mission briefings and insignia-driven lore, there is a story there. A connective tissue that gives you just enough of a reason to be certain you are not only a good guy, but also that you are a protagonist: you look like, and play like, a hero. Those games were, after all, based on a series of novels by one of the most prolific and successful thriller writers ever, after all.
But in Ground Branch, there are no attempts at a cohesive story. The few patches you can apply to your character signifies nothing, and has no special meaning in universe. The enemies are, universally, copy-pasted models of a default terrorist enemy (with voice lines that are still ambiguously foreign in accent, so they don’t even get to avoid the problematic implications of that). The maps are laid out just like normal maps, with no real hints at what the terrorist faction you are hunting is doing there, or what an elite branch of the CIA’s “Special Activities Center” (which is what the “Ground Branch” actually is in real life9) would want with it.
And, frankly, this is a missed opportunity. Those original games didn’t just work because of impeccable gunplay and unmistakable (and brutal) tactical combat, but also because they made sure you felt like an elite operator taking on covert operations against radical splinter cells. They made you feel not just like a killer with a gun, but like an avenging angel of the breach-and-clear.
In Ground Branch, you mostly just feel like a schmuck with a good gun. A talented schmuck, sure, but not one accomplishing any real missions of note. You aren’t rescuing the president’s daughter from radical communist sympathizers or defusing bombs that will blow up a skyscraper in Mumbai, you are just doing those things because this is a game, and you are supposed to. The closest thing you get is that there is an open bank vault in one level. And for a game named after the covert, deniable branch of the CIA’s special operations division, it sure feels like a missed opportunity.
As a final, positive note, I will end by saying that, if you look past the lack of narrative frame, the simulationist aspect almost makes up for this, almost certainly owing to Jone Sonedecker’s incredible experience with both the genre and in coordinating with actual military arms10. When you find yourself exchanging bolts of death at 200 meters, breaching a door into what could be a room full of enemies, or engaging night vision just before entering the cabin you just knocked the power out of, you forget that about those big-scale reasons, and get to just feel like a deadly, but fragile, predator.
You could be cut down in a moment, from hundreds of meters away, with a single shot, but your use of tactics, gear, and just faster reflexes can — and just might — win the day. Even for its faults on the higher levels, I could never fault Ground Branch for its moment-to-moment gameplay, just as I couldn’t fault its core system of weapon customization (or, I might offer, personalization). If only the rest of it lived up to that.
You can find Ground Branch here, currently in early access and going for a non-sale price of $29.99.
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