From UbiSoft comes the third title in the Ghost Recon series named Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. This review covers the PC version. This is important to distinguish as the the Xbox 360 version is both developed by Red Storm, instead of Grin, and offers a different gameplay experience.
You are Captain Mitchell, leading a crack team of squad members into a war torn Mexico set in the future. Since it is the future you’re equipped with a handy little eye piece that can distinguish the enemies from the good guys, so issues of friendly fire are generally a non-practice and it makes it easier to take out the bad guys.
The first thing you’ll notice are the graphics in the game, and a sort of brown/yellow hue that is rather heavily used in the game. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does remove a lot of vibrance from the environments, though it certainly gives the game a much more seriously look instead of cartoony environment.
Graphically the game is a cut above most other games, offering modest realism in it’s presentation and execution. The buildings, vehicles and characters all offer a level of urbanism that hasn’t been seen in a game for quite some time. There is a penalty for such graphics, and that is peformance. The game uses Grin’s custom Diesel Engine, a graphics engine that seems to work like a Diesel car offering power with the side effects of pollution.
The pollution in this case is that of the performance and optimisation of the engine, which is pretty much non-existent. The game hardly flies on lower rigs, and on my 6800GT it can slow down quite extensively in mass combat situations. You really need a higher spec PC to get the best out of the game. Even then, you only have to visit the UbiSoft forums to see a mass of complaints about the game not performing to scratch when compared to the other game engines, such as that of recent Prey. It’s half a case, where the engine really is poorly coded, but a better machine will offer the best performance as a given. There is no question, however, that the engine could easily have been coded far better to run at a performance level.
With that gripe out of the way, the game ran reasonably fine on my rig. The game puts you in charge of three other squad members who are yours to control and manipulate as you see fit. Since the game is combat, the commands offered are combat situation commands such as cover and fire and attack amongst others. The enemy AI is pretty excellent throughout, and sneaking up on them offers greater rewards than going for them head on, which will reward you with the game over screen. It’s up to you whether you wish to clear an entire sector of enemies, your other choice is to try and avoid them – this is easier said than done as the enemy AI has a fair awareness of its environment and fallen comrades.
The same praise cannot be levelled at the friendly AI in this case, as issuing commands becomes a gifted art rather than a simple process. Telling the AI to move to a particular point can become frustrating as pointing to a destination and the actual destination the AI moves to can become two different scenarios. It’s baffling to think why the AI was coded in such a way, but that is how it is. The only useful commands are move (when it works), cover (cover and fire) and follow, the others being redundant and of little use. The problem is that often the friendly AI will face the wrong way to the enemy, and be fired upon, often ignoring gun nests and vehicles as danger. It’s unfair to expect the human player to do all the work, after all the game is based on the leader and command of the three other troopers, not a lone gunman. It could be argued that the AI is as good as the commands given, but the AI is a bit poor in reality.
The single player campaigns are very well designed offering a good mix of challenge and thought. If you’re used to the run and gun of games like Doom 3 then you won’t last long in this game. The probablity of success depends on several factors, including your awareness of the enemy, your ability to adapt to situations from recon to all out combat, and your control of the AI, however, fiddly they may be.
Multiplayer is a little disappointing out of the box, however, offering the single player campaigns as a co-operative solution. It’s disappointing as there are no unique maps to take hold of. So once you’ve seen the maps in single player, you’ve seen them in multiplayer already. Still, what you have is pretty solid entertainment as there is the twist of the host of the game being the leader, and should the leader be exterminated then it’s game over. It makes the game a lot harder for the host, since he’s also the only one that can command the AI. With a friend or three the game comes into it’s own in multiplayer mode, providing some tense action and lots of expletives.
What would have improved multiplayer co-op somewhat is, aside from more maps, would be the ability to have more than four players in a team, and to have the option to split the team with command divided between selected human players. As it is, it’s fun, but short lived.
The other multiplayer mode is domination, a sort of run and gun game crossed with Battlefield to play mechanics of holding a position long enough to make your own. It’s not a lot of fun with two people, add to which playing on some servers you find users exploiting the game’s lack of anticheat facility by using hacks and cheats.
With several patch upgrades you can get a third option which is Deathmatch, a mode that no one really seems to care for due to the poorly designed custom deathmatch maps available. Respawn kills are common place.
Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter is not a perfect game, and Ubisoft has promised to provide more patches for the game. At times it feels like a beta product, feeling unfinished and lacking polish (there is no AA in the game, for example), and the number of patches to date is a testament to this problem, as well as committment and support from Ubisoft. It’s a catch 22 for Ubisoft as they’re damned when the patch, and damned when they don’t. That’s the failure of not providing a completed product to fans of the Ghost Recon series and they only have themselves to blame.
Verdict: A flawed title that will improve with patching. As it stands, it’s good, but not great.