Tactical first person shoot 'em up under the blazing sun of Mexico.
The mission starts in an unfortunate manner – The Ghosts get separated during the parachuting, and the area is crawling with hostile forces. A very dangerous series of missions lie ahead.
You play as Commander Mitchell, the leader of the Ghost Recon elite team. The suspense starts the moment you start the game – there's no place for prolonged tutorials which is refreshing. The game takes place in a future version of Mexico City. The areas you play in have been deserted – the city is now a combat zone. The city is rich in details and every corner is a potential death trap – the rebel forces are smart and can surprise you when you least expect it!
Even though the game takes place in and around a huge city, there is some variation to the maps you play on – there are industrial zones, inner city areas, plazas, residential zones, parks, outskirts, suburbs and so on.
As you start making your way to meet up with the rest of your squad, you'll notice that the area is indeed very creepy – there's no sign of anything living. Some empty cans litter the abandoned streets – here and there small fires still live on presumably after an explosion. This really sets the mood of the game as it really puts some contrasts into focus – the dead silent and hollow city streets can quickly become a raging battlefield, once the rebels notice the Ghosts in the vicinity.
Before Mitchell has gathered up his squad, he'll encounter the rebels in some intense firefights. The game will give you hints on how the controls work as you go, so it's quite friendly to newcomers to the genre even though it throws you into these life and death situations early on. Your squad members will need orders from you - otherwise they will just be standing around, and you'll have to get used to the CrossCom technology the Ghosts use to issue commands and to communicate with each other.
Basically this is done like this: you select a member in your team by pressing 1, 2 or 3, and then you bring up the command-list with your middle-mouse button. Simply point on a location with your cross hair and select "move" to command that squad member to move to that location. Other orders are "follow" which will make that squad member follow you or "attack" that will make them assault an location with full force.
When you or someone in your squad spots an enemy, the location of that enemy will automatically be transmitted to your squad (and the intel-satellite watching from above), and you will see a marker on your screen where that enemy is hiding. You could think that this gives you an unfair advantage, but it really doesn't help that much. If the enemy is hiding behind a wall for a few seconds, the marker will disappear. So you absolutely need to keep an eye out for enemies all the time.
All in all the game works quite well. A miss-click when issuing orders can result in very idiotic orders, such as telling your buddies to run into enemy fire. To make things worse, the squad members can be very slow to react if you regret an order and immediately issue a new one – sometimes they just want to die, or so it seems.
Other than acting squad leader this game offers some tactical gameplay as there are many ways you can use your squad members and you can use the strategies that you see fit. Mostly this game leans towards being the tactical shoot 'em up that anyone with an affinity towards first person shooters can pick up and love.
As mentioned, the city is detailed and there are literally tens of thousands hiding places where the enemies can hide. They'll shoot you from roofs, around corners, from behind cover and they will use tactics to advance on you once they know where you are. Most of the time though, you'll have plenty of chances to catch them by surprise and not the other way around.
The firefights are outright deadly if you stand in the open. You will be dependent on staying behind corners and lean out to spray some well placed salvos – and the rebels will do the same. You'll have to keep an constant eye on the amount of bullets you have left in your magazine, because if you are caught reloading your weapon at the wrong time you could be risking your life. You'll also be wise to use as little ammunition as possible, because finding new ammo will not be easy in the battlefield.
The game is indeed very hard – even on the "normal" difficulty and that's fine, I really like the challenge and that the enemies feel somewhat realistic. You'll die a lot, and that means that you have to replay a lot – and that can, after a few times take anyones edge away. This is the biggest problem with this game because the loading times between missions are really painfully long – even on a dual core system!
The graphics are good – although they definitely overuse the bloom effects. Everything looks like a dream land of sorts – everything is shining and lush, even though the game is supposed to portray an abandoned city in a miserable state. They also utilize the bump-map technology extensively, which results in some odd looking textures – for example your clothes look like plastic or clay, and the pavement looks like it has been waxed. But the overall art direction follows the theme well and the UI looks futuristic and neat – just like it is supposed to.
This game also runs a bit slow, even on powerful computers – the frame rate is fluctuating very much, and there are slowdowns that should not be – the game does not seem optimized to run on PC computers at all.
The sound and music is great – the ambient music that plays in the game really builds up the tension, the music dynamically changes when you reach certain areas and then changes back when you have taken out the threats. The sound effects are also adding to the drama - you'll hear rebels yell out orders to their allies, and if you happen to kick one of those empty cans lying around you'll hear it clunk away. The theme song also stands out - it's cinematic and simply has an awesome melody.
Like the previous Ghost Recon games, this one really relies on the multiplayer. There are some interesting game modes, not seen often like the four player co-op campaign, OGR Cooperative, which is a huge open area where you can play with up to twelve people in three squads and your mission is to cooperate and eliminate the hostile forces in the area. Interesting to note is that in both these modes you are out of the game if you die – with the exception that if you have AI controlled squad members you will take control of one of them.
There's also the Hamburger Hill mode, which pits two teams against each other and the objective is to capture and hold a specific area for the longest time possible – the team that holds the area for the longest time will win the game. There's also your standard deathmatch and team deathmatch games. You'll need to download the latest patch to gain access to all available game modes and maps. With the latest map-pack installed there are 12 multi player maps, which can be used in the different modes.
There aren't that many different weapons you can equip your squad members. There are two assault rifles, a rocket launcher, a sniper rifle and some different grenades plus some light hand guns, and that's about it. This is remarkably notable if you would compare to the previous Ghost Recon games.
Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter is a very nice game, but you'll have to be ready for extensive loading times should you play it. Playing the online modes with random people can seem pointless as there usually aren't any strategy involved, but with some friends it can be more than awesome.
If the developers would have optimized the loading times a bit, as well as the graphics renderer - maybe allow users to turn off some of the effects, this game could have been totally mind blowing. If they then also would have continued to develop maps and scenarios and introduce new game modes, this could have become a timeless classic!