If you have been weaned on first-person shoot-em-ups – and, in particular, if you recently played the gloriously visceral and responsive Black – you will find playing GRAW a deeply frustrating experience. It looks like a third-person shooter, and puts you in first-person mode much of the time, but it doesn’t feel like a shooter at all. Because it is so rigorous – one bullet in the head or a couple in the body and you’re a gonner – you have to advance about five metres at a time, snapping to whatever cover you can find (which is achieved simply by pushing into that cover object; sadly, you will find yourself coming out of cover inadvertently at times, which is typical for such games). And when you’re behind cover, the shooting system is way too clunky.
Two clicks on the right stick give you maximum zoom on your SLR, but when you’re zoomed in, you have to click again to zoom out before your character will duck his head under cover again. And if you’ve only half-zoomed and don’t realise it, you’ll zoom in further; by the time you realise your mistake, the likelihood is that you’ll be dead.
To compound the clunkiness of the shooting mechanism, you must hold the left shoulder button down to hold your breath and keep your gun steady. Sadly, you can’t die if you hold your breath for too long. Which is a surprise, given GRAW’s veneration of realism above gameplay. Nor can you get much shooting accuracy when on the move – aiming becomes pretty hit-or-miss – which instantly removes any fps vibes.
Being dead is something that you get used to when playing GRAW, because it’s a diabolically hard game – and we could only bring ourselves to try it in the easier of the two modes. You’ll encounter pockets of enemies and think you’ve eliminated them (lulled into a false sense of security by the red enemy HUD indicators) break cover and take a shot in the head from a hidden enemy. Back to checkpoint, cursing.
The net result is that you retreat into your shell, hanging back in a thoroughly cowardly manner while ordering your squad-mates to take out the enemies. But you never have as much control over them as you do in Full Spectrum Warrior (even though the squad ordering is just about the only thing that is economical and logical about the control system), and occasionally, you will think you’re ordering them to fire on an enemy when, in actual fact, you’re telling them to rush to certain death. Although, at times, they do refuse to run into raging fire-fights.
Even some of the set-pieces are rendered annoying by their realism – in the first one, for example, your Black Hawk-mounted machine-gun moves in an annoyingly stiff manner and soon overheats, refusing to spew out more than the odd bullet here and there. Which is annoying when you have thousands of President-kidnapping rebels firing at you.
SPOnG score: B - technically superb, let down by some gameplay elements.
[i]It took us a while to pinpoint precisely what GRAW’s problem is – but it’s obvious, when you think about the man who licensed his name to the project (what did Clancy actually do in GRAW? Write the script? Get his team of researchers to suggest what weapons should be used?). Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter shouldn’t be a game – it should be a film.
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kid_77 14 Mar 2006 15:21