Realistic shooting. But lack of attention to finer details. Boring story. Levels look dull,some ridiculously difficult.
Great graphics. Nice realism, interesting guns, good potential for nice teamwork (singleplayer). I said Potential. The interface to give the Ghosts i.e. your teammates
Commands in great but are quite a number of problems in the gameplay. You can move them around using a satellite map and a cross comm. which lets you give orders to your men and position them using just the crosshair in the game. Other orders include a follow command which is quite useless because if you are sprinting from one position to another, these ghosts run a distance, and then stand and scout for enemies and run again. Even waypoints which you set using the tactical map, their movements are far from satisfactory. It looks (not the animation but the way they behave) quite unnatural as well. And try getting them to shoot at something. Yeah something and not someone because for the life of me I haven't been able to get those Ghosts to shoot at an enemy or lay down suppressing fire at an enemy position without living up to their name 'the Ghosts'. And by that I mean your teammates are as good as ghosts. I think I am a fairly good player and I did make it successfully through the first 4 missions keeping all of them alive, but I did most of the shooting. The problem with these incompetent guys is that they do not return fire effectively. If you ask a Ghost to move across from one cover position to another and he encounters enemy fire as he moves, he'll tell you about it but when he gets into position he rarely ever returns fire. Ask him to lay suppressing fire; there have been numerous occasions when he tries to shoot at the location\person you have designated through the wall he is behind. That is just lame. The sniper really doesn't do much spotting. I add a sniper in my team to spot far away targets but he doesn't do that much. And in a firefight, the sniper rarely does any shooting himself. They are practically useless most of the time. Hence they are as good as Ghosts (or I must have a really bad team strategy and a bad gamer, but I do believe it is the former since I have reached the last mission without a trainer or cheats. I don't have the interest to finish the game). These brilliant soldiers even tell you when you're getting shot, like you need to know that!
Since my sniper doesn't really do much of the spotting, I have to do it myself. But the other Ghosts rarely shoot at targets over a distance of a street block unless somebody is shooting at them. They rarely do any good shooting. While the enemy seems to have telescopic vision, the Ghosts at times can't even see a few meters in front of them. I have to do that myself. And I cannot do it with a sniper rifle (ok, I can at times but that takes the fun out of using a neat assault rifle and an attached grenade launcher, and it is difficult at close range…Just boasting my skill incase somebody decides to say that I am a bad strategist). So, since you are a member of an elite team, and this particular elite team is equipped with a real time satellite map, the least you can expect to have with such advanced technology is a pair of binoculars. Since the Sniper doesn't do his job till he gets shot at, I might as well do it. But no binoculars means you cannot see far. That is frustrating because your enemies seem to have telescopic vision. You can walk out into the open at times, check the map zooming out as far as possible and see that the area is clear, and yet you can get shot at by a dude with an RPG. And surely enough, you'll soon be a ghost. Now that just sucks. Ok, don't want to give the player a binocular, at least thermal vision on the satellite map. Something to even the overwhelming odds with the game's super sighted, super accurate A.I (even in the Normal difficulty).
In contrast to this, the Ghosts, whenever they engage the enemy, there is always an exchange of fire (atleast I've seen that, and it isn't because of my bad strategy either). i.e. they rarely just take down the enemy with well-placed shots and not be shot back. And they rarely return fire and not complain about taking hostile fire. It's really irritating sometimes when they have to yell, "Captain, I'm taking hostile fire" repeatedly, even when they have the permission to shoot on sight. Do I need to know they are getting shot at? Why don't they just shoot back at that guy? Sometimes, I feel you play their mother.
I think this game would have been better had the Ghosts been a bunch of Convicts freeing themselves of their Jail sentences by doing this work. In which case these amateur team of yours will be fitting for the story line.
There is no getting around this one. Even if you manage to work your way through the first four missions the fifth is very difficult. And with the P.C version not having the back to wall cover feature like in the console versions (for those who don't know what I am talking about, the cover feature like in Gears of War and Rainbow Six Vegas).
It makes this game extremely difficult to play. And the game has some set save points. You'll have to play through every irritating moment (which the first time around was tense and exciting but after dying a few 100 times gets frustrating) of creeping around, peeking and clearing out the easy targets and then facing the choke point. There is a quick save button, which allows you to save between checkpoints a certain number of times. How exactly that works I am not clear and I didn't bother to find out anyway.
And the bad guys…Ok forget the bad guys. Almost every soldier in the game wears a sort of rounded helmet with eyeglasses, heavy armour and a fancy uniform. I'm guessing the developers used the same models for the Ghosts and the enemies. Ok, the Ghosts can wear the tacky gear, but not the Mexican rebels. It looks too artificial for a group of Mexican rebels to be wearing such gear. At least in the first game, the enemies wore hats and equipment decent enough to look different from what you wear. And it would have been nice if there were AK-47s for the enemies to use instead of a HKG36s. They don't come off as rebels. Rebels do not have such equipment. Even in the near future. Maybe their elite unit will have that but not the rebels, who in most cases are poor people who are fighting an ideologically driven war. They will not possess the training and equipment that the Army possesses much less the Ghosts. That is another thing that I find used in excess in games these days. You're always part of an 'elite' military team. Anybody who reads Tom Clancy books, or even knows something about the army, or is an Army Movie buff, will know that any kind of Special Forces group isn't only about using fancy technology. They perform better under stress. All you get in GRAW 2 is the technology. Kind of a waste of your talents I'd say. With GRAW 2, there isn't anything particularly elite about the Ghosts. For a Clancy Game, I'd expect a more realistic and accurate depiction of military operations and the scenario. It loses its realism further when the commander keeps putting everything on your shoulders. You, three other guys and a satellite map and a funky vehicle that can refill your ammo from. And you're always called in to aid the Mexican army. It's lame. In the game, the Mexican army behaves totally incompetent. Even more idiotic than the ghosts. In comparison to them, the ghosts look elite. What's more the rebels manage to have tanks and helicopters and the Mexican army has none. Can somebody explain to me how that happened? A better use of the Mexican army would be to provide support to the U.S Black Ops, in terms of transport, intel, and the covering fire needed to bail whoever is left of your team out of a situation at the end of a mission. And what exactly happened to all the civilians in the large parts of town that everybody is fighting in? There are half destroyed buildings and deserted streets…how? Just fighting by rebels. Some civilians (dead or alive) around the place would have added more depth to the game. The game is really drab in terms of the story and some of the details as I mentioned to you before. But in terms of the firing and the movement physics of the game, this game is very realistic. You can see expended magazines on the ground! (I just love that feature). It would have been a nice touch if bullets could penetrate thin materials. I found myself trying to shoot at a guy behind asbestos sheets a number of times (mostly after dying and reloading), but I cannot shoot through the sheet. And since there are smoke grenades thermal vision would have helped a great deal. An option to take control of any Ghost at anytime like in the previous games (before GRAW) would have been nice. Since I usually get to use the grenade launcher I assigned to a soldier myself after that bum gets himself killed without using it, it would have been a nicer option to take control of them. The back to wall feature like in the console versions. Binoculars. Maybe a team formation while they are following you, and team spacing. Better colours on the buildings. The whole city seems to have one colour. Little more vibrancy is definitely needed.
To conclude, this game had the potential to be a great game but falls short on the essential elements. Why anybody should play it, and the fact that they should believe in the story and not find it a joke. The graphics like most games today are great, sound is fine, but gameplay isn't all that great. No issues in controls. And you cannot play the singleplayer campaign in co-operative mode online. This game simulates extreme realism in shooting and getting shot but that's it. Nothing more.