Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2

James Matson performs recon on the sequel to Ubisoft's impressive tactical FPS.

More screenshots, videos and other goodies at the Atomic G.R.A.W. 2 site!


You’ve just been dropped onto a deserted road with nothing but your squad, a 30mm automatic rifle and the dying Sun at your back for company. Surrounded by hostiles, you’re only barely aware of the voice of a Mexican television presenter – doing a passable Benicio Del Toro impression – rattling on about evil U.S imperialists. That voice; coming to you via a video feed that includes your instructions for the mission at hand, is the last thing you’ll hear before heading into combat against hostile South American rebels.

Welcome to Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2.

The original Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter (G.R.A.W) was a respectable and attractive stab at the tactical FPS genre. It had all the right mechanics with a dash of Tom Clancy storyline to carry it through – resulting in an engaging and bullet saturated experience. G.R.A.W 2 manages to continue this tradition and while it doesn’t deviate far from the original has added just the right amount of tweaking to convince us to take up arms once again in the name of explosions and glory.

For those unfamiliar with the G.R.A.W legacy, here’s a brief rundown: Suiting up as a ‘Ghost’ – the codename for a bunch of highly trained special ops death dealers – your job is to protect the U.S.A, this time against a rather well organized and financed cabal of Mexican insurgents. Set in the near future, you’re given a startling array of modern weaponry and support systems to wage war with, a refreshing change from the glut of WWII shooters that have had a popular surge in the past few years. With 10 mission zones spread across three ‘Acts’ you’ll typically be given a number of objectives within each map revolving around the destruction of bad guys and/or equipment, rescuing allies or locating secret weapon caches.

You know – all the fun stuff that elite special forces types get to do.

Hey, guys – wait. I’ve changed my mind. I want to go home.

Thankfully this isn’t any Rambo ‘one man army’ deal. Joining you are your Ghost teammates, A.I soldiers under your command who form a large part of the tactical element in G.R.A.W 2. It’s not enough to get yourself into the perfect position to scout for enemies or provide adequate cover as you begin picking off snipers, you’ll need to use your team of Ghosts effectively too, either to cover you, follow or move ahead to draw fire. All of this is tied together using the CrossCom battlefield map, which allows you to set waypoints and execute orders from a top-down view of the action, something you’ll come to appreciate in the more hectic phases of the game.

The control system is thankfully flawless reproduction of the original G.R.A.W with an intuitive combination of mouse click / scroll wheel selection taking care of issuing orders to your group or individual Ghosts, but a couple of welcome tweaks have surfaced. Firstly your teammates can now be issued orders under two umbrella modes of ‘recon’ or ‘assault’. This largely affects how they’ll move from location to location, whether they’ll tiptoe and seek cover, or just up and leg it from spot to spot.

The sweetness of a C4 explosion as you destroy an artillery cache in one of the early missions.

G.R.A.W 2 also does away with the originals ambiguous method for moving your A.I squad from spot to spot – which involved pointing your crosshairs at a certain location and hoping for the best. The end result was much flailing and cursing as you sent your guys straight into open air and enemy bullets. The new method still sees you using your view to ‘point’ towards a location, but there are now markers which appear underneath your crosshairs denoting where each Ghost will take up position once you’ve issued move orders. No more guessing if your team will end up behind the wall in cover, or right next to it staring stupidly at a horde of angry men with rocket launchers.

The updated control interface allows precise positioning of your team, selfishly in this case – far in front of you.

Of course – if the A.I was a little better, this might not happen no matter how badly you place your team; they’d fall back quickly to a defensive spot should they come under fire. Unfortunately one of the letdowns of G.R.A.W 2 and a legacy of the original is that your teammates aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed. Quite often they’ll be slow to react to enemy fire and seemingly incapable of finding cover at the right time. This is in stark contrast to the enemy A.I found in some of the later missions, where soldiers will identify and hone in on your position from seemingly superhuman distances. We found ourselves more hindered by our ‘commando crèche’ on some maps, than helped by them. Still, for the most part they do a reasonable job of support and if you stay on top of setting orders and keep them mobile you’ll arrive at the objective points with an intact team.

In military circles, this is known as an ‘aw shit’ moment.