A brilliant all-round tactical shooter, with cool weapons and a great storyline.
The gunplay is all strictly tactical and cover-orientated. If you're playing on the higher difficulties, you'll be cut to pieces if you spend a couple of seconds out of cover (maybe even a second). The mechanics are fairly simple: run into a wall. It automatically puts you into cover and the game's third-person camera is good at showing you what you're doing.
There are some cool set-pieces with uniformly big explosions. There are many intense firefights, which some people have compared to COD4 - a completely different game. Talking of explosions, they look brilliant, much like the rest of the game. However, I have tried the multiplayer (split-screen) and the environment graphics were terrible, like a kinda PS2.5. There are many shades of brown, which is the game's main colour. You'll be playing in urban Mexican towns most of the time, namely Juarez.
You might have a different way to approach each situation in the game, but most of the time, you be to busy bossing your squad around and killing people (peon slaughter!). The squad command is very intuitive, with basically one button needed to perform many different things. For example, point at the ground, they'll move there. Point at an enemy, they'll shoot him. The controls are very well laid out and it becomes second nature if you play it enough.
The weapons in the game are brilliant, I think. You'll basically use the same gun (which will probably become your favourite) until you unlock extras at the end. You will have to use some weapons in the game. They are all appropriately high-tech and have great sound-affects and features, like a gun that can be used from behind cover accurately without exposing yourself.
Overall, I thought the game was brilliant. There was no never a moment I didn't enjoy. Despite it's short campaign, I was thoroughly impressed. Sadly, it looks like there won't be another GRAW, with Ubi working on Endwar. If you like shooters and are not a great fan of other shooters' run & gun style, then you should definitely try it. Go on, you know you want to…