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Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 Preview

Writer: David Latham » Blog
Posted: 22nd Feb, 2007

Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Red Storm Studios
Release: 2nd Quarter, 2007

Ghost Recon has come a long way since those shady times camping under a tree in the forest as you waited for a patrol of terrorists to wander down a jagged hill 80 meters away only to watch your sniper team mate take them out before you even take aim. Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 is the second Ghost Recon game to hit up the current generation of gaming and offers some new features, but still remains mostly the same as its predecessor GRAW, the successful Xbox 360 launch title.

Jumping in to the demo, you quickly learn that you take use of your flying “UAV Cypher” support drone a lot more than in the original game. You are basically made to use it after every group of soldiers so that you don’t go in to battle blindly, and have a semi-advantage over the enemy. Soon after killing the first few enemies, you get control of a new toy – an unmanned “M.U.LE”. The MULE is a vehicle that you can control, and it carries all the supplies you need. Keeping it out of range of the enemy is probably a wise choice though, as they like to target it and destroy it on sight.

Apart from the new vehicles, there really weren’t that many upgrades noticeable in the demo. The graphics were a slight improvement to the naked eye over the original, although the developers might say otherwise, and the user interface has been made a lot easier to use. You have a new tool called Cross-Com which basically allows you to see whatever your team is seeing in small windows on the left of the screen. This helps if you have a large TV, but for people still playing on little screens, good luck.

What was most annoying about the hands-on singleplayer preview of GRAW2 was the ending. They chose to leave gamers in the midst of a battle. You come around a corner, pounding on enemies that are getting dropped out of helicopters, then all of a sudden the game cuts out and a message appears, “To Be Continued”. If that doesn’t annoy the average gamer, we don’t know what would.

We can’t wait to get our hands on the full version though, to try out the new battlegrounds, defending U.S. soil in El Paso, Texas. The new Medic class will also be a fairly useful necessity on the battleground, switching to him to heal your ghosts. Ghost Recon has never really had much of a medical supply side to the game, you’d get your health back when you reached a safe-point or a new mission, but that’s about it.

All up, Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 looks like a whole new game with new missions, new weapons, a new interface, ... (continued next page)