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Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 (review)
Entry posted by J.E. Sawyer
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Will Project X be a good game?
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I played GRAW2 back-to-back with Rainbow Six: Vegas, and I found the former lacking in many areas. Though I would say elements like the GUI, level design, animations, and sound were reasonably solid, the core gameplay itself was often frustrating. The problems were a culmination of bad AI, a poor command interface, some other generally clumsy mechanics, and story/dialogue elements that could have been much better.
Your teammates are not very effective. Not only do they fire their weapons at a rate of about one bullet every six seconds, but they have the firearm accuracy of Don Knotts in The Shakiest Gun in the West. Their responsiveness to commands is slow and often haphazard in execution.
These problems are compounded by the d-pad command interface. It's very easy to accidentally move your team when you simply want them to fire at a target. And when they do move, they usually move to a place where you do not want them. The game doesn't show you their target positions until after the command is given. This is something that Full Spectrum Warrior executed much better several years ago. In FSW, it was always very clear where your folks were going to go. In GRAW2, such a mistake puts your squad out in the open unless you re-focus them or pull them back to you.
I did not like the cover mechanics much. I enjoyed R6V's because it allowed me to always be explicit about when I went to and from cover. GRAW2's slippy-slidey method was often frustrating. It was also really annoying to lean out from cover and fire a rifle grenade into the cover I was using (typically killing myself).
I had trouble with the health meters because I'm red-green color blind and don't really "read" heartbeat spikes. Usually the cases where I lived or died seemed haphazard because enemies weren't that accurate with their guns. The firing mechanics were pretty solid once you went into aim mode, though really without aim mode you might as well not even have a fire button, because you will miss with almost every shot you take.
Piloting the UAV could be fun, but it got old very quickly. It just became a routine "I have to do this" step when the UAV was in the level. In the later levels, the UAV was absent but it didn't really matter because dudes were just pouring out at me.
The story's premise was fine, but the inclusion of tons of foreign mercenaries seemed really weird. I think I heard an English accent, American, Dutch (?), and a voice that sounded like Satan himself. I also have started to notice that companies (especially Ubi) will do just about anything to prevent having an obviously Arab or Muslim antagonist in the game. It's like the United Colors of Terrorism.
I won't be too hard on the story or dialogue here, but there were a few moments of notable inconsistency. I did think it was interesting to deal with the U.S./Mexican border as a setting, but the story kind of devolved into foreign mercenaries and terrorists bringing nuclear weapons through the border which didn't seem that fresh. There were some very fun moments in the game, particularly any of the Blackhawk rail sequences or the occasions where you had a Littlebird cruising around with you, but overall I thought the game could have been much better. It was obviously entertaining enough for me to finish it, but I had plenty of frustrating moments.
I award this game 5.5 out of 8 UAVs.
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