This highly Immersive game is definitley worth a purchase if you're a fan of the series or just tactical games.
There I am, going to my next objective point, "Hostels spotted." I go prone. Crawling past my enemies, I turn to get a look at them through my scope, wondering if I should risk shooting them or not. I pull the trigger, "Rebel down."
Other rebels notice, they spot me and begin shooting. This has turned into an intense firefight, rebels are coming at me from all sides, trying to flank me on my left, I take them all out. Back to sneaking to my next objective point.
There's a taste of what Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter will be like on one map. Running around from objective to objective, running into intense firefights with rebels throughout mexico city, and continue.
Anyway, let me just jump right into the review here,
Before you begin the campaign, the game, like most games, gives you a tutorial. Showing you all the basics: how to use the great cover system in Graw, how to command your unit, and even how to control Tanks! This will ALL come in handy during the campaign, and the controls to all of it are smooth and very easy to use for a tactical shooter on the Xbox 360. To move your unit to a spot, simply press up on the D-pad, if you need them to regroup, press down on the D-pad. The D-pad is pretty much what you use to move your unit and friendly armor around. Easy enough.
So, onto the campaign.
Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter puts you in the shoes of Captian Scott Mitchell of the Ghosts, and does a great job doing that as well. Once you get into the campaign you will feel like you ARE Scott Mitchell, you will be immersed in the huge city that is Mexico City, full of Rebels and enemy armor. Though sometimes the city may feel empty due to the lack of civilians, (though in one mission, it says they have been evacuated) everything is made up for thanks to the fantastic graphics, and the huge city made up of tall buildings and structures. The design of the city is fantastic, many times there is more than one route to take to get to your next objective. There really is no wrong way, only your way.
Throughout the campaign, you will be completing a lot of the same kind of missions: Go here, rescue the VIP; or Go here, plant C4 on that armor and blow it to pieces. While these missions are very fun, they can get somewhat repetitive. But the game does keep things interesting with the great design, and throwing in some parts where you shoot enemies from a helicopter with a turret before or after a mission.
Now for the gameplay.
GRAW has some very nice gameplay features, it is a third-person tactical shooter, and allows you to use a cover system similar to the cover system in games like Gears of War. The game can be pretty challenging at times, but not too challenging as to make you want to get up quit.
GRAW's AI is pretty good overall, but can trip up at times. Sometimes if you give your team a command, one member may not follow your orders, and just stand where he is at. That isn't much of a big deal since he will usually comply if you give the command a second time. Other times the enemy AI may be prone, and you could walk up to them and they won't move or seem to notice you for a matter of seconds. This isn't much of a big deal either, since this happens very rarely. But this IS a big deal: When you go to rescue a VIP and you have to hold your position to protect the VIP. Many times I would look at the VIP and see him right out in the open, and I felt like saying: "Mr. President, are you TRYING to get yourself killed out here!?"
And this can be extremely frustrating when it causes you to restart a mission because of the death of a VIP.
The graphics, as I mentioned earlier, are some of the best graphics out there. (2006 point of view). The details on the buildings are fantastic. And when you crawl around in the grass during a night mission, it makes you feel like you are really there, crawling around with night vision goggles with your sight aimed at some unfortunate rebels. Though I did run into a few small graphical glitches:
In one level in the city, some paratrooper transport vehicles looked almost deformed, stretched out, and just glitchy. But this didn't happen often, and didn't cause the game to suddenly stop working for some odd graphical reason.
Multiplayer time.
I jumped into a co-op objective match in the Fishing Village map with one of my friends, telling him to follow my lead since I knew my way around the map. So we sneaked around our enemies. Not shooting one yet, but already capturing an objective point. This is how it went until we saw some rebels we couldn't resist shooting at, and so, another intense firefight arose. Then, back to stealth.
This is how it was most of the time, and it was a very nice change of pace from some of the games you see today. Though there is one thing I didn't like about the multiplayer, it got rid of the cover system, But I guess since you can still peak around corners, it's not too big of a deal.
OVERALL: 9/10