If there was one genre for the Xbox 360 that was generally lacking since its launch, it’s the third-person military shooter. There were a plethora of sports and racing titles released for the 360, and the excellent COD2 filled the FPS genre nicely, but gamers craved a team-based shooter with a strong online multiplayer mode ala SOCOM to call their own. Enter Ubisoft with Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter attempting to fill that void, with some of the prettiest visuals the 360 has seen to boot. They’ve succeeded wildly with the involving and complex but not overly complex single player mode, but the online multiplayer mode falls short of being the great experience it has the potential to be.
The year is 2013, the area of operation- Mexico City. Stolen U.S. military equipment has fallen into the hands of Nicaraguan rebels who arrange to sell it to Mexican forces. Meanwhile, the Canadian prime minister and the American and Mexican presidents gathered together to announce a new treaty but a power-crazed Mexican secretly organized a coup.
The situation degenerates quickly- the Canadian PM is killed and the American president is missing. You play as Captain Scott Mitchell and your mission is to lead your elite Ghost team, rescue the president, and destroy the insurgency. To assist you, you have the most technologically advanced weapons and equipment at your disposal.
The moment your helicopter drops you off for your first mission, you’ll immediately be drawn into GRAW’s world. The action takes place from a third-person viewpoint, which allows you to see your finely detailed soldier and the excellent animations performed when you move or reload your gun, while at the same time allowing for proper use of the environment for cover. I’ve found that in many FPS games, it becomes difficult to shoot from behind cover because you can’t lean around objects or see the action from a distance like 3rd person games provide.
When you approach a wall or car, you’ll automatically flatten your back against it with the ability to slide to the left or right and peek or shoot around corners. Pressing down the left stick changes positions from standing to crouching to the prone position. I liked how you can change positions on the fly so if you are running and you start to take fire, you can hold the left stick down to jump belly-down on the floor into a prone position, or you can opt to press it slightly to slide into a kneeling position. When you are crouching behind cover, you can peek over and shoot without exposing yourself.
Shooting is simple enough; press the left trigger to aim, locking your character in place while you control the crosshairs, and press the right trigger to fire once you draw a bead. There is a tutorial at the beginning of the game and it shouldn’t take long to master GRAW’s excellent control scheme.
The Mexican slums, trailer parks, desert and urban areas, and junkyards that you will play in look fantastic due to an admirable texture-mapping job that adds small details to just about everything. Billboards advertising products can be seen in the background, words are spray-painted on random walls, and clothes hung out to dry are found on clotheslines swaying with the breeze. The environment is interactive as well—you can shoot the tires flat on a car (shoot it enough and the tire will roll off completely), shoot a car window and it will shatter and set off an alarm, rounds of powerful guns actually blow small craters into concrete walls, and explosions cause any palm trees in the vicinity to shake and drop a few leaves.
GRAW contains some of the best lighting and particle effects that I’ve ever seen on a console. You can almost feel the heat of sun-drenched concrete that glows with a bright orange hue in the direct sunlight with varying degrees of intensity as the clouds shift. Shadow effects are done to perfection- shadows of trees are spotted to emulate light filtering through the branches and the shadow impressively sways with the breeze. Fires seem to have a life of their own with bright orange flickering flames emitting a thick black cloud that can be seen from a large distance.
GRAW includes animations that other games take for granted. For example, when you select a grenade as your weapon, you’ll actually see your soldier open a Velcro pouch on his vest and yank out a grenade. When was the last time you saw that? When you’re crawling on your belly and hit the reload button, you’ll shift over on one shoulder to pull a fresh cartridge out of your pocket and slap it into your gun.
Not to be outdone by the graphics, the sound contributes greatly to the atmosphere. The guns sound loud and crisp and each gun has a distinctive sound. You’ll hear babies cry somewhere in the distance, dogs bark, insects buzz, and roosters crow. There is quite a bit of voice work and all of it is first-rate. Short videos often pop up on your HUD, and real-time briefings are sent to you from the command center informing you of any new developments, and on-field logistical report will patch in to give you tactical advice. The videos look good, though a bit cartooney and the lip-synching is a little off.
The team that is assigned to you is helpful for the most part but they do their share of moronic things like blow up a truck from a few feet away and get thrown off their feet. You can order them to move quietly or go into assault mode and shoot anything that moves. When they detect a threat, they are efficient in taking it out be it by bullet or rocket propelled grenade. If one gets shot down, you can walk over and heal him yourself, or you can order one of your troops to heal him while you provide cover. The lack of blood and subsequent “M” rating hurts- when one of your men is shot and writhing on the ground rubbing a bloodless wound, well it isn’t very believable.
For most missions you control a flying drone that you can use to spot enemies without being seen. You can order where you want the drone to fly by toggling your map and indicating the target and the drone will fly there. Press the LB button to put the drone in “detect” mode where it will fly closer to the ground and search for enemies. Be careful though, at low altitudes guards will notice it and try to shoot it down. At times you are granted ground and air support in the form of tanks and helicopters respectively. You can control where they go and you can walk behind the tank and use it as cover. If you want your support to take out enemies or an enemy vehicle, you can order it to do so. While this is a cool feature, I found that my tank would often strangely sit there idly taking shots without returning fire unless I ordered it to. You can see what your support sees via the video on the upper left corner of the screen—yet another feature that GRAW manages to get right. The addition of drones, tanks, and planes that you can direct adds a nice element of strategy.
Each mission has a unique objective from protecting a target to taking out a target but they mostly involve getting from point A to point B alive. The terrorists are largely unpredictable and things can go from silent one minute to absolute chaos the next. The action is intense with not a second to catch your breath. After each mission you are whisked away in a helicopter or armored vehicle and sit in the hanger watching events unfold on video while the game cleverly loads the next mission. There are no loading screens at all between missions to break up the flow. Often times, you’ll board a helicopter only to man a huge machine gun and take out targets on the ground while they shoot at you. These shooting sequences not only look awesome as you fly over cities with sunlight gleaming off the glass buildings below, but they’re hard at times with lots of enemies shooting at you at once. One especially memorable scene has you trying to take out two helicopters while you weave through elevated highways.
The terrorists are smart and they will make good use of cover and try to flank and outmaneuver you. To combat this, you need to be stealthy and use all of your resources, especially your drone. You can flick on night vision at any time (useful for the night missions) and you have a variety of weapons at your disposal, including a special combat rifle that can spot enemies through thin walls and shoot through the wall to kill them. Because of the intelligent enemies and the fact that you can’t take very many hits, GRAW’s single player mode is fairly challenging.
After being satisfied with the single-player, I was expecting the same level of quality and sheen for the online multiplayer mode but found myself greatly disappointed. There are tons of options and ways to customize your game- which is great- but you can’t go into a specific server and see the titles of the rooms, you have to search for a specific type of game every time you play which is a pain in the ass. One of the coolest modes is playing campaign missions from the single-player game, but with up to 16 people online. I had lots of fun with this mode and spent most of my hours online in this type of game. There are lots of other modes including deathmatch, CTF, and territory, in which you can play co-op or solo (every man for himself) and you can customize what weapons are allowed and if you want respawn turned on or off.
The main problem with the online mode is it lacks the cohesiveness that games like SOCOM contain. You can’t see the names of the rooms, after each game is over you are brought back to the lobby without any option for best of 5/7 etc., and there are no clans, which is unforgivable for a title of this magnitude. Another glaring issue is that the cool control scheme from the single player mode is inexplicably gone-- no longer can you lean up against walls and peek around. Instead, you can walk up to a wall and awkwardly hold the LB button and use the left stick to lean left or right, but you can’t back up to the wall.
The servers were reliable overall, and I only got booted a couple of times. Headset chat is supported and after you die, you are able to flip around to view the characters that are still alive. There is a Trueskill ranking system that gives you a number up to 25 based on your experience and performance. If you see a guy with a high number, you’ll want him on your team.
GRAW does many things right and is a very good game overall, but its flawed online mode holds it back from true greatness. It puts you in the shoes of a soldier of the future with sophisticated weapons and equipment and provides a challenging single player mode that combines strategy with intense shooting sequences. The visuals and effects are second to none on the 360 and the HUD is ingeniously designed to provide lots of information without feeling cluttered. With a few tweaks, the online mode could’ve been outstanding but as it stands now its only above average. With that said, any 360 owner that enjoys shooters would be wise to add GRAW to their collection.
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9.2