RUN, don't walk to the nearest mall and RETURN THIS GAME ASAP! The Xbox version takes three steps backwards, solider!
GAMEPLAY:
Right off the bat you will notice that the A.I. is good. These Mexicans can shoot your sombrero off at 50 paces so don't take them for granted. I like a good challenge but I never felt comfortable enough with the controls to believe that it was a fair fight. Overall the game play was just ok, not as good as the last GR. A nifty new ability to sprint has been added and it is mapped to the left thumbstick. The problem with that is that when you are using your sniper rifle you need to depress the left thumbstick to hold your breath and stabilize your gun. At times when I was trying to stabilize I would break into a sprint and run out into the open... not cool when an AK-47 is aimed at your head. The mission maps are large enough to give a good sense of space.
MULTIPLAYER:
So the single player missions left much to be desired, I was really looking forward to the online battles with my brothers in arms. When I took this puppy online I expected a tour de force of action and innovation... nope.
The first thing you will notice is the excessive load times. These are the longest loads this side of a Dreamcast console. I lost a number of connections with hosts and then I was finally in. After a few rounds of LMS and LTS I knew what must be done. Yep, I'm going to take this bomb back to the mall for a refund. You can't tell which squad mate is speaking, they have eliminated the player's name that used to be above their head, so you don't even know which team mate is standing in front of you unless he turns around, waves his gun and says "I'm the guy dancing with the SCAR rifle". The online maps were uninspired, the connection issues will require a few patches to fix and overall there is not a sense of solid game play.
GRAPHICS:
Have you played Rainbow Six 3 on an Xbox? Well there you have it. I honestly think that UbiSoft took that same RS3 engine and simply reused it for this game. You get the same first person gun view, the same ability to either stand or kneel (you can't go prone anymore), and the same lean feature to peek around corners. I kept waiting for someone to say "Tango down, Ding!" To make matters worse there is a constant static on the screen that looks as if gnats are swarming around your head and you can't escape them! The character models are good, but what happened to the clean and detailed visuals from GR2? Grainy textures are the theme and you will spend much of your time squinting at your screen to verify if the pixel you saw move was an enemy or a gnat flying around your head. And what is the deal with the HUD? The heads-up-display is more of a nuisance than a help. Being able to see what your partner sees is a good idea but the image is small and fuzzy so it never really gives you an advantage. With no option to turn the HUD off or at least decrease the size of the HUD icons; this is just another feature that should have been left to the 360 version only.
VERDICT:
To sum it all up... this was a bad mistake. For the Xbox version UbiSoft should have used their last GR engine instead of rehashing old technology. I give it 6.7 out of 10