Squaddies

But GRAW is a squad based game, that’s supposed to interject tactical aspects into the gameplay. I say supposed to, because often when you need to make use of the rest of your squad, you’re under such heavy fire that you don’t have the time to use them to full effect. That said, controlling the rest of your squad has been made pretty simple, with single presses of the D-pad up or down to send them to a location, attack a position or regroup around you. Unfortunately the AI is a bit hit and miss with your band of comrades. In one particular mission where you have to blow up some tanks, you need to make sure that you order your squad to go somewhere else before setting the explosives. If you don’t they will simply mill around the tank and get blown to bits when the explosives detonate!

Of course you can heal your squad members as many times as you like, assuming that you can get to them in time while the bullets are flying. You can even order one squad member to heal another and herein lies one of my major gripes. If you can heal your men ad infinitum, and you can order them to heal each other, why is it that you can’t heal yourself, or order any of your men to heal you? It seems that you’re so hard, that you laugh in the face of medical attention, right up to the point when you hit the deck, dead.

It’s not just your squad that you get to control though, you occasionally have access to air support and armour support. So you can get an Apache helicopter or a tank to take out armoured enemies for you – of course you still have to target the enemies before they can fire on them. You also get access to a kind of flying recon drone. You can send this to any area on the tactical map to scope out enemy activity, and hopefully save you from walking blindly into a trap.

If there's one major problem with the single player campaign mode, it's the checkpoint save method. The levels can be very long, with several save checkpoints throughout – as you reach each checkpoint your progress is automatically saved so that if you die, you will restart from the last checkpoint. Now, the big problem here is that if you stumble past a checkpoint with barely enough health to stand up, then promptly die, you will then restart from that same “near death” position. There’s no way to go back to the previous checkpoint, so if you find yourself caught in this trap, you’re left with two choices – keep trying to finish the level with almost no health, or restart the entire mission from scratch. If you were just allowed to restart from previous checkpoints during the single player campaign, it would save your X360 a lot of verbal abuse.

Multiplayer

If the frustration of the single player save point method gets too much for you, or you finally tire of healing your comrades while no one sees to your medical needs, you can always try some multiplayer action, and here I’m glad to say GRAW excels. If you manage to join a game where the other participants are willing to play as a team, you’ll realise what a squad based, tactical shooter is all about. Forget about issuing basic commands to your computer controlled squad, simply tell your real, live team mates where to go, what to do and how to out flank the enemy. The multiplayer maps look simply stunning and add oodles of atmosphere to the proceedings. Although the general game styles are standard multiplayer fare, GRAW looks and plays so well, that you can’t help but enjoy every moment. For me, GRAW offers the best multiplayer experience on the X360, although that will probably change once Battlefield 2 rears its head.

But despite the fact that the multiplayer aspect of GRAW is undoubtedly impressive, it too is not without its issues. For a start, the control method is different from the single player version. Neat touches from the single player campaign like being able to take cover behind walls and obstacles are not possible in multiplayer mode. At first you don’t realise this and will be busy trying to stick to a wall and peer around the corner, while the enemy wonders what the hell your doing, all the time firing in your direction. Also, although there’s a cooperative mode, you can only play limited cooperative missions and can’t play through the main campaign mode with the help of your mates.

Conclusion

Ultimately Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter is like a flawed diamond – it’s beautiful from so many perspectives, but you can’t help but notice that it’s not quite perfect. The graphics are nothing short of breathtaking, and the gameplay can be totally immersive at times, but the annoying issues like the save points and inability to receive medical attention soon destroy the illusion of an urban combat reality that GRAW tries so hard to create.

If you want to see what makes the Xbox 360 so special; what makes it “next generation”, look no further than Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. I’d be hard pushed to think of a game on any platform that is as visually impressive as this one. If the rest of the game had been as polished as the graphics, this would be a classic of epic proportions, unfortunately the annoyances and frustrations that you encounter during play, take some of the shine off. That said, even with its flaws, GRAW is a great game and one that heralds the next generation of interactive entertainment – if this is a taste of things to come from Ubisoft, I’m very excited indeed.