Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter
March 14,2006 -

Back in October of 2002, the Tom Clancy franchise of games consisted of two series; Ghost Recon, and Rainbow Six.  Neither of these two series really was anything spectacular.  Sure, they offered your typical flavor of strategy first-person shooting, but they were both flawed and relatively boring.  When Splinter Cell released on the Xbox in November of that year, it really upped the ante and the Tom Clancy franchise was forever changed.  Since its release we’ve seen what has become a steady influx of must-have AAA action games bearing the Tom Clancy namesake.  The newest of those is actually from the weakest of the three series—Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter—but now the series has stepped it up farther than any of the previous Tom Clancy games has and offers what is easily the best in the franchise, series, and probably on the Xbox 360 system for that matter.

Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, or GRAW as we like to call it, is the newest iteration in the Ghost Recon franchise.  The series just had a relatively recent update last year with Ghost Recon 2 and Ghost Recon 2: Summit Strike, but it had been nearly 5 years since the first one came out in 2001.  Now that the third and most recent game is out on the Xbox 360, it’s going head to head with some fierce competition, including Perfect Dark Zero and Call of Duty 2.  In case you were wondering, and you probably are, though they are all pretty different styles of shooting games, in many ways, GRAW is easily the superior to all.

You play the role of Scott Mitchell, a captain of the top notch Ghost team.  While he doesn’t play out as memorable as Splinter Cell’s Sam Fisher or Rainbow Six’s Ding Chavez, he’s largely a suitable role for this game.  The game takes place in 2013 in a desolate Mexico City after the leaders of Canada and the United States are summoned to a summit to discuss the future safety of North America.  Problems arise when Mexican rebels attack them and kill the Canadian Prime Minister and problems then ensue ten-fold.  The game is action packed and the story is interesting and surprisingly enough, it’s thoroughly believable.  Easily, GRAW has the best story yet of all the Tom Clancy games, and could suffice as its own movie or book like the best of his work.

The core mechanics in GRAW are left largely familiar from the first two games and its following expansions; however, everything has been tweaked to near-perfection offering the most enriched tactical shooting experience found yet on any platform.  When you first start the actual campaign, after you go through a quick tutorial and knock yourself off a cool 25 point achievement, you will notice how amazingly detailed and real Mexico City looks.  You start off flying in on a Black Hawk helicopter and you have control of this scripted event by moving your head around so you can take in the absolutely unbelievable vista.  There has not been a single game to render the look of a real life city quite like this and it really gives you a lot to think about for the future of this coming generation of gaming.

From the first couple of minutes playing the game, you’ll find out this is not a walk in the park.  Like every Tom Clancy game, really, you’ll find yourself having to pace through the game at a steady flow so you don’t jump the gun and walk into a deadly trap.  Each corner is an important move, and in the beginning, you’re all by yourself and relatively untrained.  After a little while you’ll gain control of a squad, which is more or less the biggest aspect that separates this game from most shooters on the market.  The commands are pretty basic; you have a cross-com which allows you to view a little bit of what your allies can see.  You’ll want to strategically tell them what do to, where to go, and how to approach each situation. 

Beyond the basic controls of telling your allies what to do, like whether to quietly approach the hostiles or to advance fast and light them up, you can also tell them to go around a building a different way than you do then highlight the enemy from another position and tear them apart from two sides.  That way your kill is almost guaranteed.  As you progress through the game you’ll find yourself giving commands not just to other Ghosts but also Black Hawk helicopters and huge military tanks.  These situations are more or less the exact same every time—as in you just tell them what to blow up—but it’s really great any time they let you use that.

Games, News, Reviews, Media and More