As Ferocious as the Acronym - A GRAW story.
About 3 retries later, I had the winning formula down, the cover mechanic works like the Rainbow Six: Vegas/Gears of War one, but is quite an early design. It takes getting used to. I found Ramirez and used a UAV and was quite impressed to how it worked, but found my self upset the game was lacking in what I was expecting.
The next couple of levels was when it really kicked in. It was the level Secure President Ballantine that destroyed me, in an amazing way. I mean a way in which I was crying on the floor in a fit of painful glee. The level starts out fairly normally with having to save the President from some Militia, and yes, I was a bad enough dude to save the President. Then when everything seems to be going so well, the Embassy explodes. Miraculously the President survives but every Mexican Terrorist you can shake a stick at moves into the surrounding area, and you take some cover in the bombed-out skeleton of the aforementioned Embassy. You are fighting for your life, and if you take time out of your Mexican killing schedule to look around, so is everyone else. There are so many of them, you wonder what the hell you can do. Then the music kicks in. This is an orchestral piece, which makes the sound fade out, so you can just hear the muffled gunshots, and see the High Definition explosions. It is AMAZING. Words cannot describe how amazing it really is. You really have no hope as to how you can hold out, with Tanks, Militia and so on, and once again, I was blown away. In the last second when you cannot hold out any longer, in come the Apaches. For lack of a better phrase, they blow everything up.
My jaw was on the floor for the rest of the game. The rest of the game could be Kirby’s Air Adventure for all I could care, and this review would be exactly the same up to here. Thankfully, it isn’t. The rest of the game has a blistering pace that the first levels missed, and I couldn’t be happier. The missions are varied, from solo mission to all out urban warfare. There are missions where you have to assassinate targets, missions where all you have to do is survive until back up arrives, but my favourite (and the most dynamic) and missions where you are couped up inside a vehicle, firing every bullet under the sun from a UH-60 mounted Minigun. These missions are awesome, and challenging at the same time. Another favourite mission of mine is where you command an Apache gunship, and a Bradley in the middle of the night. This kind of mission is what makes you happy you have CrossCom. The CrossCom is a device built into your HUD where you control the other weapons in your arsenal. You usually command your troops from one of these, but in select missions you command vehicles and other devices. In this mission, your kills are very low. It is your command that keeps the mission going forward. Taking cover behind a Bradley tank, you keep the tactical map open at all times telling the Apache what to attack, and moving the Bradley forward very slightly letting him be mobile cover for you and your men. That is a textbook mission in Ghost Recon.
The game, in all truths, is over too quickly. I moved through it on the medium difficulty – having a hard time at it, I might add – in just under 9 hours. Even with only 9 hours play, I don’t feel cheated. It was a great 9 hours of game. I have put longer into a game and left with the game feeling stale. This leaves you wanting more. As far as the plot goes, it’s thoroughly enjoyable, even if it is in every other game with Tom Clancy’s name attached. The ending is a little anti-climactic, but even a battle with Darth Vader upon the Death Star would have been anti-climatic, with a build up like that!
First of all, thank you for reading my rant. I just thought it would be better to use this format than a traditional review format as this game deserved something special. All in all, this game was amazing. Yes, the AI is lacking, and it does *sometimes* feel a bit like a trudge getting from set piece to set piece (Quarterback springs to mind) the game easily destroys any criticism by being a thoroughly enjoyable game, and definitely worth playing through. Especially now, since the price is around £20 in most shops.
In conclusion, Roll on GRAW2