User Rating: 7.9 | Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon XBOX
To be blunt, Im glad the single player component wasnt longer then it was cause I would have probably lost interest. This not because its long in anyway, but more so because there was nothing that seemed particularly interesting about what I was doing. In most cases each level, if you will, was comprised of a square piece of land upon which there were generally multiple objectives. Most of the time you could pretty much do them in whatever order you wished, which actually didn't do much to make you believe that anyone of them was particularly important. To illustrate: one level had you rig a bridge to blow so reinforcements couldn't get by, making future assaults on the isolated area easier. Sounds logical enough, right? Sounds like if you attacked without destroying the bridge first you might trigger some sort of counter offensive that would be damaging to the whole operation, right? Wrong. Take out the bridge, take out the encampments, take out the tanks guarding the bridge, leave the bridge for last, whatever, you will find absolutely no reinforcements coming up to make your life difficult. So, the Tom Clancy intrigue song and dance wasnt up to par. Thus I hoped the gameplay would save the game. Again, I was wrong. A full comando style attack is simply not smart, since your men will fall quickly, leaving you to what amounts to baby sitting your squad mates creeping through levels, ambushing patrols along the way. A few inconistencies make this really frustrating. First, your guys around you see multitudes better then you can. You'll hear the radio "Enemy spotted", but there is only a tiny window where you can flip to your map and see a general direction they are located in, and even then you'll spend the next few minutes just trying to spot them yourself. And when you are in stealth mode, your men also stop and find cover. This is all well and good, but as squad leader your job is to assess the situation, which becomes kind of frustrating when half your team is cowering like schoogirls in the bushes while you try and figure out what you are up against. When I realized this, I tried to take advantage of the computers keep sight and I assigned snipers to guard the high ground while my assault team advanced. Well, again I was dissapointed, as the computer treats snipers as simply more accurate soldiers with less ammo. They will provide you with about as much cover as a Janet Jackson tear away outfit. Also, when you assign a group to recon or something, they are stuck in slow mode until you change their command. That means if someone throws a grenade at them, they will simply return fire until said grenade explodes, at which point they will be very very dead, as this is the most logical reaction to getting blown up by a grenade. I can see why following orders would be important, but I really wouldn't mind part of my team beating a hasty retreat out of harms way. I can see this game would be good for online play, but at some point a squad based tactical shooter has got to step up to the plate and deliver a game experience worth playing without other people around.
