Ghost Recon has been a highly anticipated release for the Xbox 360, but missed the November 2005 launch. It was pushed back twice in order to ensure the game was not rushed, and was finally released in March, 2006. This version of the series comes with lots of improvements and additional features, but the core of the game is the single-player campaign. GRAW is still the same methodically paced, squad-based sniper game, but the formula has been polished to be palatable for today’s generation. Xbox Live support has been added to this version, so players can get together for sqad-based fun.
Here’s some promo copy about the game from Ubisoft:
The face of war has changed in Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter™. Enemy lines blur and there is no longer a clear opponent. New enemies and new threats require a new type of warfare and a new type of soldier. Enter the Ghosts. In 2013, the U.S. Army will implement the Integrated Warfighter System evolving what we know as the modern soldier. IWS combines advanced weapon systems, satellite communication devices, and enhanced survivability into one fully integrated combat system. The IWS program has been developed to meet these new threats head on. Now, it can be tested on the battlefield.
In this next installment in Ubisoft’s award-winning squad-based military shooter series, become the soldier of the future. Equipped with cutting edge weapons and communications systems, you will find yourself immersed in a detailed universe that sets the stage for the urban war of the near future.
- Next-generation gaming technology: Advanced Warfighter is built from the ground up for the Xbox 360™, maximizing increased power to deliver phenomenal graphics and a host of innovative features.
- The soldier of the future: Gain access to the future of military technology. Using a fully integrated combat system with cutting-edge weapons and communication systems, gamers will embody the soldier of the future. Based on actual military research, the Ghosts give gamers a realistic view of how war will be fought in the next decade.
- Revolutionary feature: Use the revolutionary Cross-Com, a communication device powered by satellite technology. Attached to the soldier’s monocle, the Cross-Com provides full situational awareness and command of the battlefield. Command the Ghost squad and remote allied forces and drones, and direct artillery and air strikes. See what the squad sees and receive visual and auditory intelligence from allied forces and unmanned drones.
- Stunning urban environment: One capital, multiple locations. Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter takes place entirely in Mexico City, one of the world’s largest cities. A stunning, meticulously detailed universe provides complete immersion in the urban war of the future.
- Top-notch multiplayer experience: Just like the previous Ghost Recon titles, Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter delivers industry-leading multiplayer and cooperative gameplay for Xbox Live®.
This game is still a Tom Clancy game at heart, and you control the persona of Captain Scott Mitchell, who commands three other ghosts as the enter Mexico City to oversee the implementation of a tri-country trade agreement, NASJA. The year is 2013 and the U.S. Army has outfitted the soldier-of-the-future with an Integrated Warfighter System (IWS), which combines advanced weapon systems, satellite communication devices and enhanced protection into one fully integrated combat system.
Mexico D.F. (Districto Federal). The Ghosts have been ordered to participate in a Joint Op Operation designed to capture Mexican military officials engaged in illegal technology sales to Columbia’s FARC rebels.
The US President has joined the Canadian Prime Minister and the Mexican President in the metropolis to sign the NAJSA (North American Joint Security Agreement) a policy to control illegal immigration and the movement of drugs and terrorists in the hemisphere.
During the public signing of the document the three leaders are attacked by Mexican soldiers. The Ghosts are ordered to meet up with Secret Service agents protecting the U.S. President and ensure his safety until he is extracted. While the U.S. president is on route to the Airport, the Ghosts secure the Mexican president.
Thanks to the Ghosts’ actions, the Mexican President will “Green light” U.S. intervention on Mexican soil in order to bring back Democracy. Unfortunately, the U.S. president never reached the airport and is now in enemy hands…
This game has been streamlined to appeal to just about anyone, from the hardcore FPS fan to the casual arcade gamer, and is still fun for the strategist. The controls are easy to learn and fairly intuitive, so you should be fairly familiar with them after the first level. Mastery of these controls will be tested in Xbox Live, as you will most likely become target practice for the other players.
Even though GWAR is more arcade-like than previous versions, strategy is still a key element. You can’t just run into the city like an idiot and not expect to be instantly massacred. Even though you have advanced body armor, you will be taken out with a couple of shots. So, the game forces you to make tactical decisions like positioning your squad, identify and take out key enemies (like that sniper sitting in the water tower).
So how do you identify enemies exactly? Well, you have a few tools to your disposal. Once of which is a scout drone, which is a small robot you can move around the tactical map and drop down to scopy out enemies and track their movement.
Once identified (by seeing them yourself or scouted by the drone), the enemies appear as red diamonds on your HUD (since you are supposedly wearing a computerized monocle) and tactical map. Information is power, and your satelite-powered “cross-com” leverages all the intelligence of all allies on the field: once any one of your team identifies an enemy, they are tracked in real-time, providing situational awareness. This allows you to make strategic decisions: do you order the helicopter to make salsa out of the Mexican rebels or are they spread out enough to strategically take them out quietly?
Whatever you decide, you can see through the eyes of your teammates, so you can get a birds-eye perspective of the hot lead spilled out of the Blackhawk, or see the fire your Drone gets when it hovers too close to enemies.
As I said before the control are easy to learn but you’ll probably will be looking down on your controller if u are actually pressing the correct button (at least that happed to me a few times) but just keep on playing you’ll get the hang of it, the controls itself are basic and straight forward and are easy to maintain, even in deep combat.
The game starts out with a simple training mission that guides you through the core maneuvers Captain Mitchell can do, in addition to commanding your squad and vehicles. This tutorial is really necessary to get the PC player familiar with the minimized console controls, but are efficient and very usable once you get used to them.
Once you’ve learned the basics, you’re presented with a cutscene that immerses you right in the middle of the conflict. You start perched on the open side of a Blackhawk helicopter overlooking an impressively detailed Mexico City. Tall city buildings, rural areas, countryside, and city streets are realistically rendered and grouped, but I have no frame of reference if the virtual city is modeled after Mexico City, but looks extremely realistic.
There are no pre-rendered cutscenes, load screens or other transitions. Everything is rendered in real time, as is as gorgeous as any pre-rendered cutscene could ever be. You are plopped seamlessly down onto a highway, down the street from an objective.
The 12 missions are spread out over a great amount of variety. On some missions you start out on your own, to be joined by your teammates later. Some missions you are a lone wolf, and other missions you command a Blackhawk or Bradley tank The controls are intuitive and offer quick response. Some control elements are context sensitive based upon your current position and selected equipment.
The missions are long and multifaceted. They are seamlessly woven together so you’ll hardly ever notice when you’ve progressed to another level (or objective).
One mission lands you alone in the countryside in the middle of the night, with enemies closing to your position. You must use your night vision and wits to take out the enemies and literally infiltrate a castle on a hilltop. You then have to “laser” a power generator so the Blackhawk can take it down. After this, you run into an entirely new section with Bradley tank support, followed by a foot campaign to eleminate three enemy tanks.
Commanding the vehicles is extremely satisfying and well handled. Sometimes when you’re in the helicopter you get to man the machine gun and mow down Mexican rougue forces (Ay, Carumba!). As in other military games, you have to manage your weapon’s heat, so you must take short, accurate bursts, because once your gun’s covering fire is down you’ll almost certainly be taken out. Sometimes you must clear the ground of soldiers before the Blackhawk can set you down to your next mission, adding to immersive and streamlined gameplay.
In other missions, you have to take out communication devices that are scrambling your Cross-Com, which disorients your screen, subsequently nullifying your intelligence of the area. You must navigate the turrain and manually identify threats, clear them out, and then take out your targets with some C4 explosives. This is a tactic game developers employ just to shake things up and keep you on your toes: once you’re finally comfortable with the controls and how to use them, you’re thrown into a situation where you cannot rely on them.
Of course, you also have the obligatory escort missions. Once you uncover and control a group of tanks, it is your job to make sure the tank platoon stays alive, all while managing your own well-being. These missions really keep you on the seat of your pants, as you must act quickly and decisively: you cannot bide your time being stealthy when your tanks are being bombarded.
You’ll also experience helicopter dogfights, use rocket launchers and wall-piercing sniper rifles. You’ll also use a nifty “cover” rifle that has a 90 degree electronic scope that allows you to take out enemies from behind a corner all while remaining safely behind cover.
The enemy AI isn’t a collective super-genius, but they behave realistically, encouraging you to make strategic decisions. If you walk down the middle of a street in broad daylight, you will most certainly be a stain on the pavement.
The enemies will take cover from fire, advance to different cover, and throw grenades (it helps to identify when they shout “Grenado!”). The enemies are placed strategically, encouraging you to perform good recon before advancing into a new area. For example, it is always best to identify and take out snipers guarding an open courtyard. You must make some significant progress before the game will save (usually when you enter a new facet to the mission), so a stupid mistake will have you cursing yourself as you re-do a huge section.
The first thing you’ll notice is how breathtakingly massive and believable the city looks. You will take several helicopter rides throughout the campaign in different modes of daylight, and the city is sprawled out all the way to the horizon with buildings and streets. Fires and smoke curl up into the sky from factories.
Lighting is extremely realistic and very well done. The game’s missions are linear over a 48-hour period, so you get to see the entire palette of lighting. Sundown, twilight, morning, and even late afternoon lighting are very realistic and visually satisfying.
The odd thing that contrasts such a believable city is how absolutely empty it is. This is supposed to be a bustling metropolis, but the ONLY inhabitants of the city are a handful of rebel fighters.
The amazing visuals are what make the game so satisfying to play. The character models are extremely detailed and have excellent motion-capture animation. The weapon models are perfectly recreated. The environments are very well done, from the sense of heat in the Mexican afternoon, to the massive polygon count of the city’s details.
These extensive environments are also interactive: bullet holes are left in walls, certain building materials are good candidates for the “wall-piercing” sniper bullets, and of course every vehicle is destructible (you can usually activate a car’s alarm by shooting it a few times or taking out its windows).
The lighting is absolutely breathtaking and provide realistic visuals. Every surface is normal or bump mapped, so nearly every surface has texture and reacts to light. Nearly every object reacts to the daylight environment, from the orange glow of a hazy afternoon, reflecting the environment in glass, or glare off direct sunlight. The city realistiaclly looks hot and dusty in the day, and satisfyingly cool and dry at night.
The different time of day colors the environments realistically… a hot afternoon will appear orange, but the long shadows are a cold purple. The lighting system also makes use of HDR-like rendering, a rendering technique that mimicks dialating pupils, so you may be temporarially blinded going from a dark area to a bright area, or if you catch the sun’s bright glare.
In 720p the visuals are gorgeous. I didn’t notice much of an improvement at 1080i, and there was some noticeable slowdown during complex scenes, such as tank explosions or massive troop movement. It appears even the power of the 360 hits a ceiling in this game.
So what about armory? Well there’s no shortage of guns in this game, from the AK74 to the state of the art MR-C is attached with a Camera Add-on that displays the video of the gun’s target directly over your point of view. This allows you to shoot around corners without even lean or peek from the cover. As well as the usual small round things that go boom.
Every member of your squadron is outfitted with light-weight bullet-proof vests, and extensive set of weapons for riflemen, grenadiers, and marksmen. In addition, your visors are equipped with high definition video cameras to aid in communication (Cross-Com and Nar-Com). The Cross-Com is located in the upper-left of your screen, which enables communications with your team, vehicles, or other tactical equipment. You see what they see, giving the player a first-person perspective of helicopters, tanks, or other ghost squadron members.
The Nar. Com is a transmission device that enables communication with executive-level personnel. This usually comes on during key elements or bookmarks in the game, telling you your next set of objectives.
3d tactical map ties into the Cross-Com. Real-time strategy… explain a little more and give examples.
AUV Cypher is a motorized spy drone that can ascend and descent into enemy territory to pick up enemy locations. Players can call up the tactical map and direct the drone to the next objective, or any point along the way to pick up enemy camps and locations.
Once enemies are located, their position appears as a red diamond on the tactical map and first-person view. This tool becomes invaluable when scoping out snipers or other well-hidden enemies. This is a good example of how the finesse of strategy allows for execution of precise targeted strikes. Going in with guns blazing will only get you killed quickly.
Tactics
Moving your squad around has been difficult in other squad-based strategy games (previous versions of Ghost Recon included). You have less control over dictating their exact locations, but the soldiers are mostly smart enough to take care of themselves. In fact, you will want to direct them to an unknown area before you charge in, as they are much smarter than you, and far less likely to die. When near cover, they will take defensive positions, and other appropriate actions when directed.
Sometimes the squad can be as dumb as a bag of rocks, like when I was running up to a bunker to plant a plastic explosive. As I was running away from the bunker, I realized my squad had been following me, and I was now passing them as they were making their way to the bunker! You do have to perform some degree of “baby-sitting” by telling your squad to stay put so they don’t kill themselves, but most of the time they know what they’re doing. Fortunately you get a limitless supply of health packs to keep them alive on the field.
You can order them to be aggressive, so they engage any enemy they find, weapons quiet, so they only fire when fired upon (weapons cool), or to regroup to your position. You can also direct them to take out a particular target by selecting the victim (via the tactical map or first-person view) and pressing up on the D-pad.
Since your teammates can worry about themselves, you can concentrate on the tactics that will keep you alive. You can drop to a crouch or go prone. While prone you can perform a quick roll to the left or right. You can “snap” to a wall or other form of cover by running into the object. When “snapped” you keep your back to the cover, and will stop at the edge, when you can then target enemies from behind corners.
The sniping is excellent. The sniper scope bobs realistically, and like other Tom Clancy games you can hold your breath for a short period of time to hold the scope steady. Some sniper rifles come with “wall piercing” bullets so you can take out an enemy in a tent or structure with thin walls. When prone, you can shoot at enemy’s feet or arms to draw them out from cover.
Switching weapons… press B to quickly toggle between grenades and your primary weapon. If you want finer granularity, you must press and hold B, then select secondary weapons or functions. For example, this is how to change your rate of fire on your primary weapon, or switch between frag and smoke grenades.
You can pick up weapons from fallen soldiers, so if you are find yourself with little ammo you can always pick up that guerilla’s assault weapon for up-close negotiations.
A game that was being promoted ever since the 360 launched and worth it, all in all this is a great game, and PC fans don’t worry its getting released on the PC as well.
In the multiplayer mode you can select what kind of “ghost” you want to be; Rifleman, Automatic Rifleman, Marksman or Grenadier. Each of these classes have their own specialties. The marksman will be the best with snipers and get greater accuracy, more ammo and quicker reload times. If you choose a marksman then you receive less ammo with grenadier weaponry, so its important to chose wisely before engaging combat. When playing online, however, you can always change your class in the lobby (but not after a match has started).
Online play is smooth and doesn’t suffer from extreme lag problems that Call of Duty has. You’re able to create your own game and invite other players into the game via the lobby. One downfall that COD doesn’t have is that when the server leaves the rest get disconnected.) Getting a quick game started is easy although you might have to wait until the current game is over, so you cannot join a game already in progress – you’ll probably be waiting a few minutes before you actually get to play anything.
Lets talk about game modes;
- Team Elimination, is a team death match.
- Team Territory, try and control zones on the map and hold them as long as possible.
- Team Objective, capture objectives on the map, it’s a capture the flag idea.
- Solo Elimination, free for all.
- Solo Territory, see Team Territory free for all.
- Solo Objective, see Team Objective, but free for all
And we got a few “work together” modes; Campaign, Co-op Elimination, Co-op Territory, Co-op Objective. All of there modes are simple, players are on one team and must complete objectives whilst facing enemy opposition. Personally I like this mode a lot. There is a certain satisfaction playing with your friends, defending your base for 30 minutes from and endless stream of enemy rebels trying to overtake you, and it’s great for those bad days at work to let loose some aggression and blast away. The only drawback is this mode can suffer from reduced network performance, so try to team up with some friends from your own region.
I found the gamer’s level online to be rather variable, I had days where I’d be “noob bashing” but also days where I was steamrolled myself, but even if you totally suck at tactical fps you still manage to score some kills, but just running in an open field wont do since you die from 1 or 2 well aimed shots.
Multiplayer support is much more expansive and impressive than other Tom Clancy multiplayer offerings. GRAW supports System Link and Xbox Live with up to 16 players (in cooperative and competitive modes). Gamers can compete against eight others in four different adversarial modes, or against the online AI in co-op mode. Fifteen other players as your allies is a truely awesome experience, and there is no noticable lag even with these many gamers playing.
The multiplayer maps are based on the single-player maps, so you’ll feel like you’re in a similar location to the offline campaign, but are designed for multiplayer playability. The co-op campaign isn’t a re-hash of the single-player campaign: there is an entirely new storyline, new maps, and much more expanded gameplay (different players can take on different territories during the campaign).
Competitive multiplayer games offer many options, from different spawn points, spawn vulnerability, and enemy targeting identification. There are many different settings that can be tweaked to customize the multiplayer scenarios. The lobby system is a good start, but can be frustrating. It takes too long to find a game, and usually you join a game already in progress, so you must wait up to 15 to 30 minutes for the game to finish before you see any action.
The multiplayer maps are rather large, and any AI is similar to the single-player campaign. You can make things much more interesting by toggling “respawn” to off, so once you’re dead, that’s it until the map is over. You can browse over the shoulder of the other teammates, so you can pretend to be a real “ghost”.
Voice chat is handled as well as other Xbox Live games, and talk among team members is critical to survival in multiplayer maps. Once you find a group of players that actually know what they’re doing you’ll want to add them to you buddy list immediately!
The multiplayer game doesn’t look as spectacular as the single-player game, probably to prevent slowdown given the extra work the console must perform. Up to 32 gamers can be onscreen at the same time (16 players and 16 computer-controlled AI). There has been no significant lag, even when the game was completely full.
In the end this a very good game, it’s fun to play and controls are easy to understand, even when in deep combat you are still able to control your squad without any effort. A strategic mind does help but with fps skills alone you’ll manage just as well.
Online gaming experience is very good with many options, and a game is easily created, as for the language issues, if you can’t stand strong language then don’t get on Xbox Live, but even though this is a violent game I haven’t had one game where they where swearing except for the occasional “Got you Bitch!”
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