Ghost Recon: Short Impressions

Some real short impressions as I'm stuck on a frustrating part in the SP-campaign and I do not want that to blur my final judgment.

I was supposed to be getting Burnout: Revenge, but instead I chose to join the online fray with this game as it seems that half the world is going crazy over it. Rightfully so as the game looks stunning, plays very accurately (only the teammates in the US military will be awfully stupid when 2013 comes...let's hope world peace is achieved by then) and is a thrilling ride.

There's little wrong with this game, it's just my type of shooter. Sneak and advance, block by block, taking your time to scan the perimeter. Which brings me to the frustrating part.

When sneaking you barely take any hits, if you execute it well. Should you take one it's nothing to worry about. But what when you are in the red, out of bullets on your automatic rifle and all you have left is a darned pistol while things get really hectic (especially for Ghost Recon standards). Then you are getting fried. Not once, but multiple times. Suppose you're not getting fried. Then you're stuck with the next small annoyance: Getting to the waypoints on your HUD. While arrows work well, too many of them makes the edges of the screen cluttered, and on top of that I'm colorblind and cannot distinguish green (your friends) from yellow (your waypoint). When the things are still heated up all I can do is run around in panic, hoping to find some kind of back door in the dark (I'm also blind in the dark....how visually handicapped I am) to get the heck out of there.

But I have to be fair. Even though it's crippling me in particular, with the game itself is nothing wrong, especially not when you get a bunch of friends together and jump into the online mode. That is where the fun is at. While the typical shooter modes like Deathmatch and King of the Hill are good fleshed out Ghost Recon versions of the same old tricks, where the fun is at is of course the 16-player Co-op missions. It can get extremely crazy over your headset, people handing out orders all at the same time, sometimes resulting in a massive failure, while at other times succeeding without knowing how, or with the help of one particularly skilled teammate. Too bad it's precisely this mode that's still a little buggy, but when this gets fixed we have a killer on our hands, if we already hadn't.

Now I'll just try to get past the frustrating part...I haven't had enough of the game yet, so I hope it lets me.