Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 ^{(Xbox 360)}

Genre: First-Person Shooter Publisher: Ubisoft Developer: Red Storm Entertainment Players: ?

By Keith B (23rd Jul 2007)

One of the quickest-developed sequels arrives, and is full of promise.

I wish I were Tom Clancy. Aside from having a stellar writing career, he’s now got almost as many games with his name scrawled across the box as I’ve had cheap beers. But as the games that adorn his name are so damn good, it’s not something we’ll complain about.

Ubisoft and Clancy make an impressive pairing, and have come to dominate both the tactical shooter and the stealth genres over the last few years. And what is the reason for the success? Plenty of innovation, and providing immersive gaming experiences.

The Ghost Recon series is both of the above, and when debuted a little over a year ago it was acclaimed as a real deliverer of promises �" a sturdy single player campaign and a fun and challenging multiplayer. It was also one of the games that Microsoft had fingers crossed for, as it was one of the first games to push the 360 with gorgeous graphics. So there was always going to be another outing, but it was a surprise that the sequel was arriving now, considering the first instalment is still quite new.

How does Ghost Recon Assault Warfighter 2 stack up? Well, to answer that we’ll look at the game in two halves �" offline single player and online multiplayer.

I thought short didn’t make it to the army?

The single player campaign kicks off with our resident Ghost, Scott Mitchell, recently finished his campaign in Mexico and due some down time. However, the Mexicans are in the thick of it again with rebels on the streets and hired mercenaries bulking their ranks, but the more threatening fact being that there is a rogue nuclear device in the city, and the rebels can strike any city in the US with it. It’s time for the Ghosts to get back into the saddle.

The game looks and feels like you’d expect. It’s polished all over, from the backdrops to the action sequences, and I don’t think I’ve seen such brilliant explosions and smoke effects in a game yet thanks to some simply brilliant lighting and particle effects. The settings and levels are also superbly done, with a very authentic feel.

The game moves between Mexico and the US, with the environment reflecting the different settings. Most of the time you will be on foot, either alone or with a squad or two of soldiers, and this element of the game has developed over the first by having a much more approachable way of handling your squads. Not only can you view out of the eyes of another man or vehicle through your communications system, you can now explode it into a full screen view rather than trying to make sense out of the tiny camera in the corner of the screen. Add in the functional drones and the excellent Mule (a sort of robotic buggy which can resupply and heal) for scouting out ahead and the action becomes very involved.

Other times you will take the seat as a gunner in a black hawk, providing a break in the gameplay and giving the player a different role for a while as you shred men and vehicles from the sky. It’s good fun and well-done, but doesn’t require much thinking to get through.

But (there’s always one), it’s very short. Very, short, indeed. In order to review it with haste I stuck it in the drive and selected the easiest of the three difficulty levels. I had finished the game in or around five hours, making it one of the shortest games I’ve ever played. I replayed it though to the end on medium difficulty and even then, it clocked in at about eight hours, so it’s not going to win any awards for its single player length then.

More than one

Multiplayer is another thing entirely however, and despite some big changes to features available in the single player campaign, it’s very enjoyable.

The multiplayer has toned down graphics (although the developer says otherwise, but I reckon it did) to allow the game to run smoothly with up to 16 people jacked in. The game also removes a considerable number of features from the single player campaign. For example, you can’t run up to a wall and crouch behind it for cover (a la Rainbow Six: Vegas), you don’t need to hold the left trigger while in zoomed-in mode on your weapon to hold your breath (it’s automatically rock steady), and a few other things that seem to have dropped off the multiplayer plans. Your initial reaction, as was mine, could be one of disappointment but there’s a bigger picture here. The multiplayer component is actually great fun and much more of a straight up shooter like Counterstrike than a tactical game. So when you’re sitting in your lounge room in single player it’s all about the tactics, whereas when you’re online it’s a straightforward kill-fest.

The game is pretty much intended for multiplayer, with an absolute gut full of options available for different types of games. There are the usual deathmatch, team deathmatch, and solo games, but Ubisoft has also included a set of online-only co-op missions, adding that extra bit of depth that makes this shine online.

So… online then?

That’s the bottom line. While GRAW2 is visually superb, well designed, and obviously polished, you can’t get away from the short game time. Online though is where it’s at with GRAW2, and I would suggest that the online component are enough to warrant a purchase of the game. I would expect that with such efforts undertaken for the online side of the game, you can be sure that there will be a long string of maps packs released over the coming months.

The evolved features, added interaction, dedicated co-op missions and a whole plethora of online options makes this a game with a long replay factor.