Improves on the original and worth picking up
The single-player side of GRAW had a number of problems, such as uneven checkpoint spacing; poor AI governing 'rescued hostages', who had a tendency to go running out to get killed (and inevitably forcing a restart); and a proclivity to level cheap ambushes at the player, often with concealed enemy troops and / or vehicles. All these flaws made many of the game's levels a frustrating exercise in multiple trial-and-error pathways. So I was unwilling to pick up GRAW 2 until the price had dropped quite a bit.
I was pleased to discover that GRAW 2's single-player does a good job of improving on things. The checkpoint system is much more user-friendly, and you now have the ability to include a medic among your three squadmates, and thus your character can receiving healing at critical moments. Encounters with enemy troops rely much less on contrived 'magic' snipers and 'pop-up' armored cars to sustain the intensity of the combat.
The player now has the ability to select from a variety of weapons at the start of each level, thus avoiding those instances in GRAW when being forced to carry the same rifle thru several consecutive levels often put you at a distinct disadvantage ( such as trying to countersnipe Mexican snipers in a nighttime plaza using a rifle without a scope). And the annoying levels from GRAW where electronic 'jamming' efforts by the enemy, rendered your vision too blurry to shoot with any degree of accuracy, are thankfully absent from GRAW 2.
Some problems remain; having to use the D-pad for issuing commands remains frustrating because of the lack of mechanical sensitivity with this part of the controller, and all too often I wound up sending my Ghosts straight into a firefight when what I was trying to do was call up supporting arms, such as helicopter or a M1 tank.
The collision-detection physics governing grenade tosses or grenade launcher shots continues to be flawed, and quite a few times I blew myself up when a seemingly accurate grenade throw wound up bouncing back onto me off a 'wall' that shouldn't have been there. And like GRAW, GRAW 2 is rather short in length in the single-player game.
Even if you're someone more at ease with the faster paced, run –and –gun action of a Halo or GoW, with its price now at or below $30, GRAW 2 can be worth your while to pick up.