Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter Review

Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter is an excellent example of the Bottom Line making its presence felt.  Every gamer who has played both the Xbox 360 version of the game and the PC version will tell you, almost to a man, that the 360 version is superior.  The graphics are sharper, the levels are better-designed, the online experience is top-notch, etc.  The PC version is the victim of harsh financial realities – chief among which is the fact that the 360 game is going to sell a lot better than the PC version.  So, Ubi made the financially sound decision to make the 360 version the best it could be and left PC gamers with a glorified port riddled with problems and disappointments.

Gameplay: 6

The biggest disappointment of the game is the anemic AI and the linear, frustrating levels.  The AI, most of the time, is on the defensive, which suits its nature well since most of the time its functions are limited to "stand ground, shoot enemy."  It's not uncommon to wipe out a group of enemies and see their buddies, within earshot and sometimes with a direct line-of-sight to their dead comrades, continue to stand around, fat, dumb, and happy. The game attempts to compensate for the shoddy enemy AI by granting the AI every advantage of cover and firepower (for instance, several machine gun nests, or a mounted grenade launcher covering an entire street), and by scripting.  Large groups of soldiers spawn behind a building and rush out to attack the Ghosts, vehicles appear from nowhere, and many locations are hardened by ridiculous amounts of snipers, machine gun nests, and tanks to disguise the fact that the AI has all the initiative and intelligence of a sack of potatoes.  It makes for a "challenging" game, but only because it relies on trial and error, memorizing troop placement, and overcoming the cheap tactics of the AI with cheap tactics of your own, in place of legitimate seat-of-the-pants decisions and creativity.  If you can hit the "Load Game" button after dying for the tenth time on a specific stretch of street, then you have all the tenacity and tactical acumen to beat Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter.

The friendly squad AI is seriously lacking, too.  Sometimes (frustratingly often) the AI will have trouble executing the simplest of orders, and other times it will wander off and stray into a line of hostile machine gunfire, and not ever attempt to turn around and seek cover.  This, combined with a checkpoint save system, is a recipe for keyboards broken by frustrated head-banging.  The Ghosts are supposed to be elite soldiers; can't they tell that a smoking machine gun barrel with an angry guy behind it is bad news?

The levels are also partly to blame. To the game's credit, it is somewhat nonlinear, allowing players to choose more or less from among two or three possible courses of action.  The choices are obvious, however (straight into the teeth of enemy defenses or around back?), and the game more or less proceeds down the same main street or block the entire level, despite the fact that the developers never cease to show off exactly how many buildings and streets the engine can render, thanks to lengthy insertion/extraction sequences via Blackhawk.  Most of the time the environments are interesting and covered in quasi-interactive props (cars that can have windows shattered and tires deflated, for instance), but the linearity of everything makes it feel like a roller coaster or an art gallery as opposed to an actual game.  For a simple run-and-gun shooter that is focused on painting the walls red and filling everything with bullets, that's fine, but for a game that lives or dies on the compelling nature of its tactical decision-making, the flaw is fatal.

Also important to note in the gameplay is the presence of a story, complete with plot twists, voice acting, and enough cheese to make a few tasty pizzas.  The overall plot is typical Clancy fare: the signing of a North American mutual defense agreement in Mexico City is spoiled by a rogue faction of the Mexican army that defects and attempts to kill all of the heads of state in the city and take over the country.  But the part that makes it a bit hard to swallow is the low-level storytelling, accomplished by your talkative Blackhawk pilot, your overly intense and bombastic commanding officer, and an assortment of minor characters like news anchors and other soldiers.  I enjoyed the Ghost Recon series (and the Rainbow Six series, for that matter) for focusing squarely on the action and presenting everything in as businesslike a manner as possible – sort of like a real military operation.  Here the storytelling is more like a B-grade action movie, which I guess is par for the course for most games.  Still, the game would have been better without it.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that there are save points. Your game is automatically saved when objectives are completed. Whoever thought this was a good idea fifteen or twenty years ago was off the mark, but the people that continue to use it today are doing so in the face of overwhelming evidence that there's no better way to piss gamers off.

Graphics: 8

Advanced Warfighter has a distinctive and extremely effective visual style.  The dust, the bump mapping on weapons and the body armor of your fellow soldiers, the gleam of the sun on car windsheilds and the haze of heat are all extremely stylish and immersive.  It feels like you're in the middle of a hotter-than-blazes Mexican summer, and when the bullets start flying, you lose track of the AI and the linearity and instead find yourself wrapped up in the bullets smacking the pavement and your teammates kicking up dust as they dive for cover behind a bullet-riddled car or an exquisitely rendered dumpster.  Advanced Warfighter is a very visceral game, ironically appealing to the exact kind of people that don't play tactical shooters.  Still, it's an impressive environment the developers have created, and an even more impressive engine, and I'd be dishonest not to give them credit for it.

There is a downside to this, though.  The rig required to run Advanced Warfighter at high settings is currently sitting in a government research laboratory curing cancer.  The minimum system requirements are so ridiculously underpowered it's hard to even make a clever remark about it, and even with a 3.5GHz processor, a gig of RAM, and a GeForce 7600, I was only able to get medium-to-low detail settings to run smoothly.  The game wouldn't even let me place settings in the upper range.  Also, when the game installed a driver for a physics card it comically informed me that "We did not detect a physics card on your machine," as if it really expected to find one.

Sound: 7

The music is either standard background ambience or “battle music,” and for the most part it's unobtrusive and sometimes heightens the tension or excitement of a specific moment in a mission.  It’s nothing special, but certainly nothing grating or annoying.  The weapon sounds are pleasantly loud and "realistic" (considering that the weapons featured aren't even deployed yet), and the sounds of rounds smacking the pavement and whizzing right over the Ghosts' heads are extremely well done.

That said, the voice acting, for both enemies and allies, is pathetic and serves to underline the general mediocrity of the storytelling.

Multiplayer: 5

Co-op in the game is entertaining, unless the hosting player/lead Ghost dies, in which case the entire mission is a wash and has to be restarted. The other online options, deathmatch and a Battlefield-like Domination mode involving control points and supply lines, are pretty much check marks on the back of the game box instead of engrossing additions to the game.  It's almost inexcusable these days to have a first-person shooter without multiplayer, so this fills that requirement, and not much else.  Still, it does provide some variety from the campaign (and co-op is a guaranteed good time) and it's not horrible at all, just standard.  There are already custom maps sprouting up (many of them of dubious quality) thanks to Grin's decision to include the map editor along with the game.  Aside from that, many of the maps are mostly rehashes of the campaign levels.

Conclusion

The Ghost Recon series has altered itself significantly since the original.  It has morphed from a wide-open, somewhat abstract tactical simulation to a linear action game with squad elements tacked on.  It's a sad symptom of a franchise that used to be focused on providing entertaining white-knuckle tactical shooters and is now focused on providing whatever sells best.