Aspiring game studios take note: Russian ultra-nationalists are the new Islamic terrorists – who were themselves once the new Russian ultra-nationalists. The international showdown between a swaggering fundamentalist Christian and a sociopathic fundamentalist Muslim is over, and now America can get down to squabbling over how best to settle the machismo-heavy bill. It’s passé to fax in a combat zone analogous to Iraq or Afghanistan – this is gaming under the Obama administration.
But in the great American fiction, there must always be a “Them” for “Us” to overcome, and without a credible new threat, Tom Clancy’s old whipping boys are vogue once more.
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Future Soldier takes place in the near future and involves a clichéd Russian para-military faction who seeks to overthrow the Federation and re-establish the nation’s superpower status. It’s up to the Ghosts, a super-secret squad of American military clichés, to save us all.
