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Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 – Grin AB - PC

I’ve always had an outside interest in the Ghost Recon series as well. Well, kinda. Years ago I played the demo of the original game, enjoyed it, bought the original game, along with Island Thunder and Desert Siege, then promptly never got around to playing them. Even now, they sit in the shelf, in the metaphorical “I must get around to playing that one day” pile. Then the series became a console title and finally returned to PC. The PC version of this title is quite different to the console version, as I understand it.

The game at it’s core is a mostly-fun, semi-stealth-based realistic-looking shooter, which provides you with an endless supply of generic heavily-armed bad guys, all of whom look like hardcore special forces, regardless of whether they’re supposed to be US marines, Mexicans, Mercs or whatever.

Your squad AI is typically dumb, but then so is the enemy, so it’s kinda even there. The game isn’t run-and-gun, and if you try playing like that, you’ll quickly die. A lot. Basically, it’s best played as a Sniping game, as you hide your dumbfuck squadmates in a building where they can’t get killed, then scurry around the battlefield picking off the enemy with scoped sniper fire. Now and then you’ll get into a firefight, but even then you’re best off in single-shot or semi-auto mode, picking the enemy off as they fire back at you.

There are a couple of missions that get stupidly hard in parts, including the final mission. For those ones I had to drop the difficulty down to Easy, so the game would allow me more quicksaves to get through.

All in all, it’s almost the kind of game I was looking for. Something with nice graphics, a realistic setting, equipment and enemies, and lots of scoped shooting. The main flaws are the silly stuff (like 2 attack helicopters combined with your stupid dumbfuck squadmates) but those weren’t too painful. If these issues weren't there, the game would be a much better experience for it.

The game is really bloody short, though. As it turned out, I wanted to make sure I’d put in enough hours to make it a worthwhile BiiF (as opposed to 10minutes) and realised I was on the last mission, so I ended up finishing it before finishing the BiiF.

Worth a purchase if you find it really cheap, or a Rental if you can rent PC games.

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Check out the demo.

Multiplayer is where the series really shined always.

This is why the copy I got with my video card (or cpu, can't remember) sits on the shelf uninstalled. I don't babysit stupid AI.

And I'm tired of championing good AI in games, nobody seems interested.

Yep.

I just (tried to) check out the online multiplayer. No inhabited servers with less than a 250 ping, and no-ones playing this thing online anyway. PC gamers are probaby all on CoD4 and TF2.

So it might have shined once, but it ain't anymore.