The missed potential of Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter made us sad. This game started out looking wonderful but tragic flaws in the gameplay significantly dropped it’s rating. We would recommend this game to anyone looking for a multiplayer-only experience, fans of the series, extremely strategy-focused gamers or people who love monotony. Do not plan for a run-and-gun experience with this game, it is a very cautious, tactical shooter. See the details below.

Graphics

Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter really excels in the graphics department. Set in Mexico City, you dive straight in to an immersing world with rich textures and dynamic lighting. Corners that seem very dark when you’re in the sunlight are very visible once you are in the shadows and your eyes “adjust.” Weapon modeling, character modeling and effects like fire, smoke and muzzle flashes are near flawless. Urban combat never looked so real!

Sound

The combat sounds are excellent. The guns sound realistic and different for each weapon. The occasional can or other trash make an eerie sound if you step on one while advancing down an empty street. The voice acting is thoroughly cheesy and unimpressive. The armory master was annoying and interrupted the game experience. The rest of the sounds and voices were well done and the EAX is scarily realistic.

Gameplay

This is where the game ended up failing miserably. It started out well enough, we dove (literally, para trooped) into the first mission to beautiful graphics and suspenseful ambiance. The first mission guided us through basic movement, tutorial style, so we could get the hang of the interface. We learned how to find and rendezvous with our team, give them commands, and use a very cool tactical satellite map to spot enemies and give complex orders. The weapons felt very realistic. Firing a machine gun causes barrel jump and you have to think about cover, reloading and other factors before you start hammering on the trigger. This is not, by any means, a run-and-gun, Unreal Tournament, sort of game. We loved leaning around walls, peaking over barriers and very satisfying explosions.
But things fell apart shortly a few missions in. The biggest mistake by far was the save system. You cannot save the game. This can be a fatal flaw in any game if not done exactly right and Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter doesn’t even come close to getting it right. Sure, sure, we understand that the developer doesn’t want you to save countless times and undermine the difficulty of the mission. But let us advise game developers once and for all: replaying the same crap fifteen times is not entertainment. It’s not fun. In fact, it sucks. The game does save for you when you reach certain checkpoints, however these are fairly far apart. Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter is a pretty realistic game. If you get shot, you die. Pretty quickly. Therefore, if your mission is to protect a VIP against an onslaught of infantry, tanks and other baddies for ten minutes, chances are you’re going to take some damage. We played one section ten times. It wasn’t that the mission was incredibly difficult, it was that the AI of our teammates was so bad they kept getting themselves killed. Charging tanks, getting stuck behind walls, loitering in the middle of a battlefield, selling girlscout cookies door-to-door in downtown terrorist-ville. We don’t know what they were doing, only that it wasn’t the behavior of a specialized commando. At one point we made it through the entire mission and were sitting in the extraction vehicle, waiting for our last moronic teammate to get there so we could leave. While trapped in the seat of a helicopter we were finally murdered by terrorists, forcing us to restart the entire segment.
Another weird thing was the complete lack of civilians. The game starts out in Mexico City, which just so happens to be the largest city in the world. There was trash on the ground, vehicles everywhere and all the other signs of civilian life with the possible exception of McDonalds. But there were not people! Yet the president of Mexico was hanging out at the local embassy. Apparently by himself. What is he president of? We thought the presence of civilians would have added a whole new dynamic to the game.
The AI, annoying voice acting and occasional buggy behavior was forgivable…IF you could save once in awhile so you didn’t have to replay the whole segment every time one of your boneheads teammates bought the farm. Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter might have made our favorite games list if they managed to fix the fatal flaw in the game flow.
If you have any hope of enjoying a single-player campaign in this game, give up now. The multiplayer may be rich and rewarding but the single player is a torturous monotony. We justify our low rating by the fact that the single player campaign is a pretty large portion of the game and therefore should be handled better.

Longevity

The multiplayer aspect might keep you entertained for months but you might never try it if you play the single campaign first. The realistic and detailed city looks really good and has lots of potential for some hard core battles. But it also is one city. From what we’ve seen, every battle plays out in the same urban combat scenario.

Technical

This game demands a lot of your processor and graphics card. It ran fairly well but we saw a fair amount of Artificial “Intelligence” issues. Our squad mates got stuck behind walls and had no instinct for self-preservation. Occasionally enemies could spot us from a thousand yards away through smoke, trees and other obstacles. That was also pretty annoying.

Our test system was an Asus motherboard with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 chip, an nVidia GeForce 7600GT graphics card and one gig of dual channel ram.