By far a downgrade from Wildlands in almost every conceivable way.
It's graphically more impressive and yields smoother animations, but all of that is worthless in a game that is so unsure of its identity. Gone is the relatively grounded premise of Wildlands and its lively Bolivian setting; Breakpoint is a strange, detached sci-fi plot set on a fictional island that feels like a synthetic simulation.
The game forces you into a slow, linear story, despite leaving its open world non-linear, leading to unexplained encounters and out-of-order interactions that break any immersion the plot may have. Wildlands gave you free reign from the getgo to explore the world and take on bosses as you like, keeping its gameplay open and simple while leaving complexity to important features like the different interactions between the game's factions. Breakpoint is unnecessarily complex in every regard but its factions; enemies rarely feel threatening or realistic, and feel unnatural in their interactions with the world and each other. There are no cartel checkpoints, military detentions, or easy-to-break truces in this game; Sentinel, the Wolves, and the Outcasts are pale shadows compared to Santa Blanca, Unidad, and the Rebels from Wildlands.
Breakpoint furthers its extraneous complexity with out-of-place gameplay elements that turn it into an always-online MMORPG; the game is littered with painstaking looter-shooter mechanics, confusing upgrade trees and skillsets, distracting progression systems, and a boring hub world that only reminds you that this game is entirely dependent on Ubisoft's unreliable servers.
Lastly, this game being developed by Ubisoft is its greatest blunder. It's dependent on servers and an external launcher that work on a roll of the dice, managed by a company that doesn't care about its playerbase, and rife with stupid content nobody asked for like NFT cosmetics. The game continually crashes, interrupting an already slow gaming session with constant crash reports and game restarting, eventually making me wonder why I'm even bothering with this game when I have better things to do. Even if Wildlands was somehow ported into Breakpoint's engine, this game would still suck by virtue of it being developed by Ubisoft. It's disappointing, because the core gameplay of movement and gunplay is fun and engaging, but weighed down by everything else. Breakpoint improves upon two things from Wildlands that feel dated, and manages to ruin everything else. I'll keep playing Breakpoint to scratch the itch Wildlands did, but I can guarantee I won't feel an inkling of a desire to even attempt 100%ing this game the way I did for its predecessor. I'm lucky I bought this on sale for $2.99, and even then, it still doesn't feel entirely worth it.
