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| Source // PlayStation |
Do you remember when the future of warfare was all interlinked video feeds and heads up displays and tactical battle maps fed directly into soldiers' brains or something? A future where every aspect of the fight was data-driven? Satellites buzzed overhead and beamed down what might as well be live footage of the battlefield, soldiers scoped the field with drones and robots, augmented reality displays told you exactly how close to death an enemy combatant was, as well as allowing you to see him through walls.
This is the kind of near-future that makes for great video games, and it's the kind that authors like Tom Clancy can run with. What would it mean to lose your electronic connection in the war? You'd have to use your own eyes and your own brain. That'd be barbaric, and I'd be lost.
As it happens, Tom Clancy lent his name to a series of tactical shooters called Ghost Recon, and as the series went on, the future became more futuristic and it adopted this hyper-connected digital battlefield experience in the form, ultimately, of Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2, a bit of a mouthful, but basically a way to say "Future Soldiers, look!"
And who doesn't want to be part of a cool squad of near-future soldiers?
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| Source // PlayStation |
Fun Times
I'm playing GRAW 2 on the PlayStation 3, proving that I don't need to jump onto the latest console release for my entertainment when the old ones still work, thank you very much (please don't stop working until I'm actually finished with you).
I remember playing a demo for one of the Ghost Recon games on the PS2, long ago now, where I was basically useless but liked the idea of a more tactical experience, more strategic. Flanking and providing cover, working as a team. It made sense, but it made for a much different game, too. So much more tactical and thinky, and therefore difficult, that I was put off ever really playing them.
That still holds true today. No new announcement of a Ghost Recon title has wowed me enough to wonder if now is finally the time to see what they're all about, and I've not heard anybody say that even the stories within are not to be missed. Ghost Recon games are for a niche audience, it seems, and it's time to see why.
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| Source // MobyGames |
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| Source // MobyGames |
At the core of GRAW 2 is the control you have over your squad. Three soldiers of your choosing, with their own stats and equipment, tag along for the mission, in this case sweeping through an area to destroy some artillery equipment.
Through a tutorial mission, we've learned that you can order them to go somewhere or come back to you using the D-pad, have either a recon or an engage stance, where they're either quiet or really rather loud, and you can also hold down the R2 button to look through a camera feed of what they see to give you an idea of the situation from their point of view.
It is from this view that you can micromanage them either further, issuing commands to attack a specific target or heal an injured teammate or move up to a new location that is outside of your own field of view. It's tactical, see, but because it's full of technology and HUDs, it's actually tacticool.
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| Source // MobyGames |
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| Source // MobyGames |
Add to this control over your squad a smart map which can often be filled in with data gathered from a controllable drone floating overhead, and you're starting to get an idea of how you can go about the battlefield without even having to directly participate in the fighting.
If you do want to engage in warfare yourself, however, you too have a multitude of control, from selecting the firing modes of your weaponry, the stance you're in, the shoulder over which your camera is hovering, how you stick to or jump over cover, and if the menus are to be believed (I didn't test this at any point), you can even dive into a prone position and roll left or right to get a better angle and so on. It even uses the Sixaxis motion controls, that bit. Optional, thankfully.
All of these options, too, make GRAW 2 tacticool to a degree where everybody should be happy. Released a year after the first GRAW, this was everything that worked in the first game with more polish, and then a few more things dumped in for good measure.
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| Source // MobyGames |
Frustrations
What a shame, then, that it's an utter slog to play. "Bulky" controls don't describe it well enough. "Cumbersome" gives you a general idea, but in terms of specifics, it's not good enough either. It is an absolute faff to play GRAW 2 as a skilled future soldier, but it sure is a piece of cake to look like a sloppy idiot.
There isn't a sprint button, so far as I can tell, so already you feel like you're having to do everything the hard way. But sprinting is for when shit hits the fan. Soldiers sprint when things go wrong. We're tacticool, damnit. We go in slow with the utmost precision.
With the upper hand and the element of surprise, you order your troops into cover while you scope out a target up ahead. You don't need them to take out one measly guard, do you?
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| Source // MobyGames |
Remaining unseen is nigh on impossible. It's not that the enemy is hyper-alert, just that as soon as one of them is aware of you, they all are. I've tagged enemy locations from above, put my squad out of sight, waited for the optimal moment to take out a guard... only for something, somewhere, to put everyone on red alert status, opening fire and unleashing chaos on the level.
No problem. A press of the L2 button switches the squad from "Don't do anything" to "Shoot, already, fools", and you can sit back and wait for the firefight to finish. I hope I don't have to keep track of ammo because I get the impression my squad are going to go through it all rather quickly at this rate.
Throughout the first mission, once I'd worked out how to stop issuing orders to my UAV and was able to regain control of my squad, you notice how useless they are. There is no way to split them into smaller groups, for example. If you tell them to go to a spot, all three of your mates will go as close as they can to that spot.
How they get there is anyone's guess, as is whether they'll get there at all. Assume they'll make a fool of themselves and get spotted, allowing you to flank around the side and at least try to influence the battle - though you'll just as likely get spotted and shot at immediately, even on the lowest difficulty.
At one point, after the area was clear of danger, I set a C4 charge on the objective and had 15 seconds to run away. I ran away. Half of my squad stayed where they were. One, inexplicably, walked into the damn blast radius and knocked himself flat on his arse, where he started screaming for a medic. At least that was an opportunity to learn how to heal a wounded squad member...
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| Source // MobyGames |
But, I can confirm that in places, GRAW 2 looks quite nice. The explosion effects are often called out as highlights, and in screenshots like these you can see that the lighting, when it works, does indeed look pretty good, even if the rest of the game doesn't - and I mean quite a lot of the rest of the game. Early days in the PS3, this.
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| Source // MobyGames |
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| Source // MobyGames |
I didn't get a chance to see any of it, nor use the rather grey night vision goggles, or sit in a helicopter and hold down the trigger until the machine gun overheated or anything like that. No, instead I just played through a level of GRAW 2 as best I could, saw that it was nothing special, and decided there were better ways to spend my afternoon.
Oh, blimey, I've forgotten about the plot. Let's see. Follows on from that of GRAW, civil unrest in South America that pushes through Mexico towards the US border. Insert political words here. Yeah, what little I saw of the plot did nothing, and I can't imagine learning any more about it would change my mind. They can't all be winners, these TC games.
Final Word
If this is the best that a tactical shooter can be, I'll leave you to enjoy them yourselves. From what I've seen, the PC port of GRAW 2 does allow you to better manage your squad, but it seems the reviewers thought even less of that version than it's console brethren. How do you make this genre all that it could be? Why are we playing GRAW 2?
It's not a complete joke, I suppose. It's not unplayable. It handles unlike most of what I've played before, both in terms of actual controller layout and the feel of all the inputs. It is, however, somewhat forgettable. You can safely ignore it, I feel, and perhaps that's how the series is viewed, despite there being a fair few entries, even recently.
On the one hand, the tactical shooter as a genre is worth looking at, and GRAW 2 probably was, at the time, the best experience you could have had. On the other hand, the experience isn't exactly a seamless one. It is, as I say, a bit of a forgettable slog, hampered by controls that somehow allow you to control everything but not in the way that you want.
Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 certainly isn't for everybody. It's not even for most people. And of the people who it may appeal to, only a handful of those will really enjoy it all the way through, multiplayer modes and all. You can be a fan of Ghost Recon and tactical shooters. You can have fun with them. You're just going to have to gloss over a few faults first.
Fun Facts
A select few Mexican officials called for GRAW 2 to be removed from sale on Mexican soil and criticized its portrayal of the country, potentially to the point of 'scaring away tourists'. I don't know about you, but I don't know anyone who gets their travel advice from a video game.
Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2, developed by Ubisoft Paris, Red Storm Entertainment, first released in 2007.
Version played: PlayStation 3, 2007.