Ghost Recon:Advanced Warfighter mini-review

Here is my metareview of Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. The graphics in the single player portion are really good, the multiplayer portion and single player portion use two different engines to render the game with the single player portion using a custom engine and the multiplayer portion using a beefed up version of the GR2 engine. Occasionally you’ll notice some strange shading on some of the characters (your teammates appear to ‘glow’ sometimes, and no, this isn’t the HUD display or anything).

The single player story is pretty decent, certainly enough there to keep you interested. The locals aren’t all that varied but due to the level of detail they don’t get old either. The sound is probably the best part of the game in that everything sounds very accurate and one cool thing I noticed when finishing up the hard level achievements is that when an explosion occurs in the distance it takes some time for the sound to travel to you. Very accurate and believable.

I haven’t play a lot of the multiplayer online (perhaps this weekend) but what little I did try was great, there are tons of tweaking options (I’ve read that there are around 1800 different game configurations to be had when starting an online game). Having a very decent co-op mode is very cool too, if you can get in a good match without a load of asshats.

My biggest complaint about the game is the AI, the enemy AI is fine, sometimes perhaps a little stupid but adequate and challenging enough that there is a sense of accomplishment. The team AI is VERY weak however, your team is best described as robots, they’ll stand out in the open and be picked off one by one. They’ll watch a teammate die when it’s obvious there is no threat nearby. They are able to be “revived” an unlimited number of times (which I suppose suggests that even the developers knew the team AI sucked if they let you revive your retards teammates unlimited numbers of times, even in hard mode. A lot of times I found the team to be a liability and regularly put them aside where they wouldn’t get hurt or notify the enemy of their presence. In hard mode I regularly put them in harms way because I knew I could revive them unlimited times and used them as bait to help discover the enemy positions. If UIBSOFT would have improved the AI to at least the level of Full Spectrum Warrior then I think this game would have come off a lot better.

I’m not disappointed with the game by any means, just the absolutely stupid team AI really hurts the experience, especially when going for the hard-level achievements. I didn’t get the same sense of accomplishment that I did in Call of Duty 2’s veteran mode. Regularly I got frustrated because of the stupid shit the team did.

A decent multiplayer offering and good single player story with awesome sound-effects make this game a buy in my opinion.