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CNET editors' rating:
3.5 stars
Very good
Detailed editors' rating - Average user rating: 3.0 stars out of 5 reviews
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Product summary
While the PC version of GRAW offers the most impressive and expansive campaign, the extreme system requirements and multiplayer headaches make this tactical shooter feel rougher around the edges than it should.
Specifications: ESRB: Teen; Genre: Action; Number of players: 1-32 Players See full specs
Price range: $14.49 - $19.99
Gamespot editors' review
- Reviewed on: 05/05/2006
- Released on: 05/03/2006
Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter finally makes its way over to the PC, and as far as the single-player game goes, this version of the game might be the most overall impressive of all. The massive urban areas you fight in are even larger and more detailed than the already spacious areas in the Xbox 360 version of the game, adding a great deal of tension since this added landmass makes for many times more possible hiding places for bad guys. Also, there's more interactivity to the world and flexibility with the tactical map, which gives you more precise control over your teammates. Unfortunately, all this added immersion comes at a heavy price, as playing the game is sure to put a strain on even the highest-spec machines. Barely make the minimum requirements? Don't even think of picking this game up, unless you're satisfied with big compromises in lighting, texture quality, and frame rate. If you have a machine that can handle the game, though, GRAW delivers a hardcore tactical shooter campaign that hearkens back to the original Ghost Recon games on the PC. It's too bad the multiplayer aspect of the game is so bug-ridden as to render it inconsequential.
Scott Mitchell, are you a bad enough dude to rescue the President?
You take the role of Scott Mitchell, a captain in the elite Ghost Recon squad in the US Army. You find yourself in Mexico City as part of the security entourage tasked with guarding a summit between the leaders of Mexico, Canada, and the US. Disaster strikes when Mexican rebels attack the summit, killing the Canadian prime minister and causing both the Mexican and US presidents to go missing. Over the course of the campaign, you'll explore the massive city--fighting rebel infantry, armored vehicles, and helicopters from within the dense, urban areas in the center to the dilapidated shanty towns on the outskirts. You'll do this solo and with the help of three teammates--who you can issue commands to--and supporting vehicles. Major landmarks, such as Chapultepec and the spire at Angel Plaza, are represented fairly accurately in the game's depiction of Mexico City. The story arc in the PC version of the game is the same as all the others, but the way the levels are laid out and structured is noticeably different than any of the other versions of GRAW. The game's campaign should last most players 12 or so hours, counting restarts from death--maybe more depending on your familiarity with hardcore tactical shooters.
The first thing you'll notice about the game is how breathtakingly massive and believable the city looks. You take several helicopter rides throughout the campaign, and the city is literally sprawled out all the way to the horizon with buildings and streets. Fires and smoke curl up into the sky from patches of fighting or factories. As you land, you find yourself engulfed by the metropolis and plying your way through the maze of buildings, streets, and alleys. The amount of area you can explore in each mission in this version of the game is noticeably larger than the corresponding mission in the Xbox 360 version--there's also more detail given to each building, leading to more nooks and doorways that you can take cover in. However, this added detail means more places for possible enemies to be lurking, which necessitates a much more methodical approach to movement in this version than in the Xbox 360 version.
The tactical-map feature gives you a nice tool to manage the bounding over-watch techniques you'll need to use to keep you and your squad alive. While you can still give a variety of simple commands to your squadmates (both singly, and as a group) from the first-person view, such as follow, move, cover, and attack, a nifty overhead tactical map gives you even more options. From this map you can issue waypoints to each of your squadmates and even set the direction they should face as they reach each spot. It's tempting to sometimes use this view to play GRAW like a real-time strategy game, as your soldiers are usually pretty effective at engaging and taking out enemies. The tactical map isn't just a static overlay--it's a real-time, overhead view of the surrounding area that lets you track movement of enemy infantry and vehicles. It's not a god mode, though, as enemies beneath rooftop areas or underneath trees can be obscured. As in other versions of the game, you'll be able to control support vehicles from time to time, such as UAV drones for reconnaissance or heavier vehicles for fire support against enemy armor and other hard targets.
The graphic detail that's so apparent from the city and environment extends to the character models as well, which are some of the best we've seen in a modern shooter. The guns you and your teammates carry are well articulated, and you'll notice folds in clothing and self-shadowing on character models and other models in the game. The animation isn't perfect--you'll see your teammates moonwalk over the ground from time to time--but in general, the human-character movements in the game look nice and realistic. The interactive nature of the environment bears mentioning, as many aspects of the environment are reactive to the battle around you. The game supports the AGEIA PhysX card for more advanced physics effects, which do offer some added particles and other effects to the game. You'll still notice principles of physics being used in the game without that kind of hardware support, though. Wooden fences break apart under heavy fire, for example, and trees and foliage sway as bullets whiz past. Vehicles never seem to come apart the same way twice when you blow them up either, but that nifty visual trick would always send our frame rates plummeting into the single digits any time we blew something up. Using the PhysX card didn't appreciably improve the frame rate or even the detail during high-stress situations either, which was a little disappointing.
The game engine is incredible with the level of detail it uses to render an entire city.
To give you an idea of the kind of stress GRAW can put on your computer, the machine we tested on, a Pentium 4 2.53GHz with 1GB of RAM and a 256MB GeForce 6800 Ultra, is considered mid-spec by the game. You're not allowed to even try to set the texture detail to high with a 256MB card--that's reserved for the pricy 512MB behemoths. The game still looks nice and sharp at medium detail, but as we mentioned, frame rates can drop precipitously when there are explosions or even just lots of enemies in the surrounding area. All of our gameplay was done at a modest resolution of 1024x768-- anything higher than that led to an unacceptable frame rate. We also tried playing with a minimum spec 128MB card--with this type of hardware, the texture resolution is noticeably compromised and frame rates are even worse. Load times can be an issue depending on your system--on our test rig, it took close to a minute to get back into the game. To get the most out of GRAW, you'll want to have a pretty decked-out machine.
GRAW's focus on hardcore, tactical gameplay is what separates this version of the game from the other versions. Unlike the Xbox 360 version of the game, which you could play by having your teammates set to follow you as you took most of the shots, the PC version of GRAW not only rewards methodical movement and intelligent command of your teammates but often demands it. Yes, you and your squadmates can still absorb a few shots before dying, and you do get mysteriously healed at some checkpoints or if you reload a save. But since there are no quicksaves available, it can still be quite a challenge to get to the next checkpoint without dying if you don't advance intelligently from corner to corner and check all possible threats around you. The artificial intelligence on both sides can leave something to be desired, though. Sometimes after issuing an order to a squadmate, they don't take up position or face in the manner you intended, leaving them exposed. Enemy AI is also fairly nonreactive and scripted. You'll enter an alley and blast an enemy, for example, while another soldier just around the corner never bothers to check on the noise. Perhaps it's better that the enemies aren't so smart, though. With such wide-open environments to explore, and the odds against you as far as numbers, the game's challenging enough as it is.
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Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter (PC):
$14.49 - $19.99
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