Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon 2 Updated Impressions - E3 2004

Ubisoft is on hand at E3 2004 with the Xbox version of Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon 2, the upcoming sequel to the popular tactical shooter. The game looks even better than it did when we recently saw it; it has cleaner textures and better lighting, as well as more and better particle effects on explosions. At this point in time, the development team has also implemented hand signals--you can signal your teammates to converge on a position, attack a target, or breach a doorway by placing your destination in your sights and giving a signal; your character will give an appropriate hand signal as well.

Like previous games in the series, Ghost Recon will have missions with multiple objectives. In one mission, we were tasked with destroying a set of convoy trucks and landed fighter jets (which was accomplished with the help of a rocket launcher). In so doing, we had to make our way past entrenched North Korean soldiers guarding the compound. Doing so required skillful use of grenades to clear small indoor areas, suppressive fire from teammates to cover run-ins through open areas, and a watchful eye for the computer-controlled British SAS troopers that accompanied us (and occasionally provided covering fire).

The game's story chronicles a fictitious conflict between China and the communist nation, and it involves weapons of mass destruction. After destroying the final target, our view of the game changed seamlessly to an in-engine cinematic sequence in which the camera swooped past our destroyed target through the sky, then refocused on a prerendered chopper arriving to pick us up.

Ghost Recon looks extremely promising, and the Xbox version should hopefully prove to be a very worthy addition to any Xbox owner's library, especially since the Red Storm development team plans to implement as many features of Microsoft's upcoming Xbox Live 3.0 online game service as possible. Ghost Recon 2 is scheduled for release later this year on the Xbox, the PS2, the GameCube, and the PC.