Ubisoft unveils Ghost Recon Frontline, a new slant on battle royale

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

Ubisoft has announced Ghost Recon Frontline, a new free-to-play, seasonally-updated tactical military shooter that leans heavily on the Battle Royale genre.

Led by Ubisoft Bucharest, the massive PvP shoot ‘em up has been in development for the last three years, and is a standalone game within the Ghost Recon universe. It’s set to feature on PS5, Xbox Series X, PC and previous gen consoles, and will comprise two game modes at launch – 'Expedition', where up to 102 players in teams of three are deployed into its multi-biome, 4x4km Drakemoor Island map; and 'Control', a 9v9 respawn point-type affair which is shorter and less hectic.

Expedition is Frontline’s flagship mode, says the developer, and sees players covertly hunting intel on Drakemoor before calling for extraction in bouts that last around 20 minutes. At the point of extraction, however, the rest of the map is alerted to the departing squad’s presence, which prompts a two-minute-long, backs-to-the-wall firefight that sounds both exhilarating and exhausting. This, in essence, is Frontline's version of a diminishing circle of death.

Through all of this, Ubisoft says strategy and tactics are key, as players allocate familiar inter-squad roles, such as medics and scouts, in order to gain the upper-hand in stealth and in battle. Here’s some of the above in motion, as well as air drops, and what looks like defence-building on the fly:

Fancy some of that? Ghost Recon Frontline is without a tentative launch date for now, but a European closed PC test event is scheduled on Thursday, October 14, with other platforms and regions to be announced down the line.

Given it’s free-to-play, Ubisoft tells us to expect realistic cosmetic items moving forward, but stresses Ghost Recon Frontline is not, and never will be, pay-to-win.

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Joe Donnelly is a sports editor from Glasgow and former features editor at GamesRadar+. A mental health advocate, Joe has written about video games and mental health for The Guardian, New Statesman, VICE, PC Gamer and many more, and believes the interactive nature of video games makes them uniquely placed to educate and inform. His book Checkpoint considers the complex intersections of video games and mental health, and was shortlisted for Scotland's National Book of the Year for non-fiction in 2021. As familiar with the streets of Los Santos as he is the west of Scotland, Joe can often be found living his best and worst lives in GTA Online and its PC role-playing scene.