A well thought out and easy(ish) to control tactical shooter.
First up, on my 2.13 Core 2 Duo / 2MB RAM / 7600GT and with the enormous patch via Gamespot installed, it's looking pretty good and so far is running problem-free.
I hated Rogue Spear (what was it again 6 teams of 6 to control?!) and didn't much like Brothers in Arms. Loved Call of Duty and Sniper Elite. Ghost Recon (so far...I'm expecting it to get difficult later on according to the other reviews I have read) appears to be a brilliant game that brings together many of the best aspects of these types of games. It is essentially a FPS rather than RTS (I would argue that complex tactical shooters are more RTS than FPS), thanks to the fact that aside from your own FPS character you only have three other team mates to control (not including the extremely useful UAV drone etc). This is quite manageable either from the 2-click mouse command or from the tactical map and the intuitive command system is really what makes this game work. After researching a decent military shooter to buy I decided I would not get Ghost Recon 1 simply because there were that many more squad mates to control, which put me off (although I survived and enjoyed Operation Flashpoint). I would say a 30min or so learning curve is about right and the first mission took me about an hour and a half game time to complete (but maybe 3 hours of work getting used to the controls and after a couple of re-loads due to deaths!).
I am looking forward to the rest of the game and am glad that I wasn't put off by my previous Rogue Spear experience.
It would be good if there was a 'lone wolf' option to play the game solo but I guess that is not the point of this sort of game although it would allow a faster pace option to the game as despite all its merits, squad control can still be tedious (it is tedious but absorbing really!). Similarly though, I am glad there are only 3 others to control. In fact, it warmly reminds me of the first Delta Force games only you have control over Alpha and Charlie!