Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter

Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter is finally here. This is the third game in the long running Ghost Recon series that started out as a tactical first-person shooter on the PC. Advanced Warfighter is a game that mixes the best aspects of everything that was great about Ghost Recon and adds brand new dimensions to the gameplay, audio, and video department that have never been done before. GRAW was originally slated to be a launch title for the 360, but was delayed and worked on extensively until it was ready to come out. Now we can finally experience not only what next-gen graphics are like, but what a next-gen title has to offer in the gameplay department.

You are Captain Scott Mitchell, a super elite soldier part of the Ghost unit. You are visiting Mexico on a short security mission while the American President is signing a deal with Mexico and Canada. You witness a rise of a rebellion force, as the Canadian Prime Minister is killed. From there all hell breaks loose and your missions take you from hot spot to hot spot as you try to put down the rebellion and prevent a world war.

Advanced Warfighter offers some very unique gameplay features and at the same time successfully mixes in popular features from other great games. You command 3 other soldiers in most missions by using a system that resembles Full Spectrum Warrior or Brothers in Arms. At the same time you are able to control M1A1 Abrams Tanks, Bradley APCs, a Cypher UAV drone, and a Super-Cobra attack helicopter. All of this is done using the Cross-Com system on your HUD. The Cross-Com renders real time video feeds that are seen by your fellow soldiers, tank commanders, APC commanders, and the chopper pilots. You can navigate them and order where to fire. The Cross-Com is an extremely helpful tool that this game offers, however it may sometimes overwhelm you with information.

The HUD itself offers loads of intel and not only the familiars like health, ammo, and directions but also a lot more. For example, all your enemies, allies, and fellow team-mates are outlined in their own unique color. The HUD also gives you constant video feeds from different Generals, the President and even the news as you see the action right in front of you.

The levels in the game are all completely different from each other. Very little repetition is found between one level and another…. And there are twelve of them. The game will take an average player anywhere between 10-12 hours to complete on Normal mode, and add a couple of hours with Hard mode on. Advanced Warfighter has absolutely no load times at all. The loading is hidden under interludes between missions. A transport Black Hawk picks you up after each mission, where you are then debriefed and briefed for your next assignment; all through your HUD.

The only real con about GRAW’s gameplay was that certain missions have you looking for enemy transmitters that are scrambling your HUD and are causing massive static. Now I wouldn’t mind if that would be one or maybe two at most in missions. But they can be found somewhere between 3-4 times throughout the game, by the time you see the static that fourth time, you can get a headache from it. Any soldier in real life would just take off his little eye-piece before going into a battle with static blocking his view.

There is only one word that can sum up Ghost Recon’s controls, and it is perfect. The controls are extremely smooth and very fluid. It is pretty astounding how many features are in the actual controls. Even if I try to list all of them, I will still probably forget a few. You can do anything from various peeking maneuvers, to changing your weapons, to changing the rate of fire on the weapons, and TONS more.

It is almost awkward for me to say that the feature with the most cons for GRAW, are the graphics. But let’s not start off on a bad foot. The graphics are amazing. The lighting effects are nothing short of spectacular; between the HDR, the bloom, and the glare effects, this is just a CG-rendered looking game from time to time. The geometry is absolutely mind-blowing. Mexico City’s whole skyline really shows in this game, fully rendered in 3d, in real-time. When the Black Hawk picks you up after each mission and you fly over the level you just progressed through on foot, that sight of all the buildings you were just in gives a real sense of accomplishment. As far as models and textures go, most of them are very good; the power of the 360 definitely shows in Advanced Warfighter.

Now let’s talk about the cons. As I progressed more and more through the Single-Player I started noticing more and more graphical glitches. Now some were pretty small anomalies, but others really took you out of the experience. For example, once I was switching my gun to a grenade and the gun seemed to have gotten stuck in the animation and was just simply sticking out my neck instead of being on my back. It just remained sticking out of my neck and shooting until I had to pick up a dead soldier’s gun just to fix the glitch. Most glitches were animation related, but at the same time it is also easy to miss most of them.

My only other gripe with the graphics department was that this game really shines during the daytime missions. A lot of the effects were specifically done to recreate Mexico in the daytime. That said, a lot of the nighttime missions look more or less bland and dull compared to the daytime missions.