Ground Branch Review

Say what you will about the CIA, but its operators have insane amounts of drip. If you ignore the questionable morals of the Special Activities Division - Ground Branch, it’s hard not to admire their gear. Desert tiger stripe camouflage, Sig P226 MK25s and HK416s look awesome. The missions the paramilitary organisation uses those items on are usually pretty cool, too. Ground Branch nails both the look and the fantasy of America's most secretive operators.

Its problem is that, besides being able to customise your virtual soldier to an absurd degree, almost everything about the experience is subpar. Once you’re done playing dress-up, the game’s magazine runs dry.

Conceptually, Ground Branch should be one of the best tactical shooters ever made. Just like in the old Rainbow Six games, this is an FPS where every move you make matters. Your character moves slowly and has a miniscule health pool, and so does the AI you shoot at. You have an almost comical amount of control over your gear, down to where you place magazine pouches on your plate carrier. There’s a ton of different maps and modes that you can play solo or with up to 15 of your mates, and you can set how difficult your opponents are. The game gives you all the tools to tailor the experience to your play style, provided your idea of fun sits firmly on the realistic end of the spectrum.

Unfortunately, almost none of those ideas come together in practice. The foundations of a great tactical shooter are here, but very little is built on top of them. Nearly every system feels unfinished. It looks, sounds and plays like a Steam Early Access title, not one that spent the better part of a decade in playable alpha before releasing fully in 2026.

‍Ground Branch’s problems appear almost immediately. Long loading times, inconsistent sound design and a dated interface all make poor first impressions. Gunplay lacks impact, movement feels awkward, and enemy AI swings wildly between supernatural accuracy and complete incompetence. 

None of this is to say Ground Branch is a bad game. There are flashes of brilliance throughout it, but almost every good idea is undermined by rough execution. 

From the way you move to how you shoot at baddies, the entire experience feels like it’s decades old. There aren’t any modern quality-of-life features, either. You can’t spawn in friendly bots to help you if you’re playing solo, nor is there even a half-assed narrative to pretend to care about. When you’re on missions, you can’t command drones to help you spot enemies. The game just doesn’t feel as polished as its ideas are.

‍Ground Branch is still enjoyable because almost nothing else offers this particular style of grounded tactical shooting. This is a PvP and PvE experience without any frivolities. There aren’t any microtransactions here, or a progression system. All you need to worry about is gearing up and shooting baddies on a huge variety of maps, then hopefully living to tell the tale to your friends.

The problem is, ultimately, that there’s very little reason to given how many better games there are than Ground Branch, even within its niche genre. The game has depth in all the wrong places. You can spend minutes positioning foregrips and magazine pouches exactly where you want them, yet firing the finished rifle feels oddly flat. There are roughly a dozen maps to toy around in, and AI that’s no better than Arma 2’s was a decade ago.

If you want to play virtual dress up, there aren’t many other titles that let you kit yourself out like one of the Central Intelligence Agencies’ elite operators. However, there are plenty that offer a complete, satisfying tactical shooting experience. Like the CIA unit that inspired the game, Ground Branch sells its fantasy brilliantly. Unlike the real-world Ground Branch, though, it struggles once the shooting starts.