It was with something like bated breath that we shoved Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, to give its full mouthful of a name (henceforth to be shortened to GRAW) into our Xbox 360. After all, following a promising start, games for the Xbox 360 have become surprisingly thin on the ground, and GRAW was one of the few titles for Microsoft’s next-gen console that really looked like the sort of effort which might persuade you to upgrade.
In hindsight, we should have paid more attention to that “Advanced Warfighter” sub-heading. And if we had, we would have approached the game with a little more foreboding.
GRAW is living proof that a game can impress you immensely while, at the same time, pissing you right off. Some people will love it, and we can tell you exactly who: the sort of people who dream of being out in Eye-raq, and who can’t bring themselves to watch Spaced because Nick Frost’s character reminds them too much of themselves. Indisputably, GRAW is the most accurately depicted modern warfare game ever. But, sadly, that very fact makes it a bit of a chore to play.
Even though we hated it, we have to admit that GRAW contains some very good stuff indeed. Technically, it is a tour de force – the graphics are simply amazing, the ambitiously modelled Mexico City is utterly convincing, the military attention to detail also, presumably, on the button.
Plot-wise, it also has a lot more to offer than most games, although as it is an effort by that one-man industry Tom Clancy, it’s somewhat dour and “God Bless America”. But at least it has a plot, rather than a series of random missions stitched together in a highly dubious manner, as is the case with far too many war games.
GRAW also puts you at the controls of some of the most advanced battlefield technology in existence letting you, for example, locate colleagues using a drone, or direct a Black Hawk to take out individual targets while you cower behind a wall. It does offer some variety in its gameplay too – you may be in charge of a squad, on your own or engage in a set-piece such as operating a machine-gun in a Black Hawk.
Unfortunately, in practice, this all proves to be nowhere near as much fun as it sounds. At least the missions have plenty of checkpoints, and you’re returned to the last checkpoint when you die. But are SPOnG the only gamers who believe that if a game needs loads of checkpoints, there’s something wrong with it?
kid_77 14 Mar 2006 15:21