Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter (Xbox 360)

Very good game. A must buy.

The Xbox 360 has been waiting for a game like this. Something that will show off the console's huge power reserves and something that is easy to get into but giving you fair few struggles along the way.All the trailers I have seen for this game have been gameplay footage - there aren't really any cut-scenes to speak of. Between missions whilst travelling in a heavily armoured vehicle or chopper you are able to look around whilst dialogue is played out. Character models, animations and scenery are all stunning and are as close to lifelike as I've seen on any game. Best viewed in high-definition though.Ghost Recon makes great use of a surround sound system as it enables you to pinpoint where voices, gunfire and explosions are coming from. There is music in the game but its mostly incidental and infrequent, allowing you to listen to the sound effects and hear enemies moving before they start shooting at you.This is a great game to play, with straight-forward controls and enough tools to get the better of your enemies making it easy to get to grips with, but it is hard, even on normal. It doesn't take many shots to kill you, there are no energy packs and you can't save between checkpoints - so you'll often replay some sections over and over in order to reach the checkpoint. Its a minor problem in the grand scheme of things.Most of the missions involve leading your team through the streets of Mexico city to rescue people or blow things up. A simple system of pointing at a location with your crosshairs and pushing up on the d-pad will issue an order to your 3 team mates, or a tank or a helicopter gunship. Making the most of your team is the key to success, although it doesn't lead you along like Call of Duty 2.With plenty of Live options and downloadable content and a game format that feels like Socom 2 on steroids, you really can't go wrong.

When you recieve the game and open the box, from past expierience of ghost recon games, you think this game is going to be amazing.When it starts up and you start getting excited, you realise this game is well made, great graphics, and probebly a great game to play. But then the training level starts, you realise the controlling of your person isnt the same as the old recons, but that doenst matter, it looks great.So you start the training level and it walks you through some basic manouvers. The game feels different, and frankly, doesnt play as well as the old ghost recons, and simply isnt as good.The missions are good, nicely made and there are origonal ideas here. But it just inst up to the same standard as the old recon games in my opinion. Its been simplified and doesnt play as well with simple group controls.But it does look great and its probably still worth getting

Great story good combat game To do well you need to think strategically

OK.

Others have given more detailed reviews of the game play. I am not a regular console gamer but found this shoot 'em up title sufficiently captivating to play more than once (at different difficult levels). Enemies have some intelligence. Various different environments to fight in. Enjoyable.

The 360 may be one of the best designed, most flexible and more importantly expandable console platforms to date but those facts become significantly less important when the launch line-up and first wave of titles are as lacklustre as they have been. Ghost Recon A.W. was supposed to be the first truly awesome title (aside from the admittedly stirring Call of Duty 2) on the 360.And it isn’t.While not a veteran of previous Ghost Recon titles I have, however experienced numerous other Tom Clancy titles and compared to the likes of Splinter Cell, taking into account the processing grunt of the 360 this is fundamentally flawed title.The colours and textures are excellent and the animations are, at times, very realistic looking. As you would expect the city looks like a fully 3D environment, rather than a game area with a 2D backdrop behind it. But right here at its most basic level amongst the impressive eye-candy there are drawbacks and short-cuts have obviously been taken. The Ghosts basically all look the same as each other and your opponents, who you rarely see up close all look the same too and their animations are limited, jerky and occasionally glitch. Even in the case of the lead character when he reloads his rifle the clip remains in place and only his arm moves. This wouldn't be so much of a problem if you hardly ever saw it but bare in mind that this is an animation that is often central to the onscreen action.The game environments too are unbelievably samey, from city streets to walkways, to parks between city streets and walkways there really isn’t much to explore and little to hold your attention. This feeling is shored up by the almost total absence of interaction with the scenery and surroundings.There are also bugs aplenty. In the couple of days I’ve being playing this title, I’ve seen the screen go black with the exception of the HUD, I’ve seen my character get locked in the ‘use item’ stance and I’ve seen incoming messages coming in from other game characters with just black backgrounds behind them. Not to mention character animation glitches which I previously mentioned.Okay, so bugs of these nature don’t totally destroy the gameplay, but some other factors certainly try to. Ghost Recon A.W is just all together too frantic, uncontrollable and has neither the brains nor the muscle to make it is a cerebral stealther or a visceral shooter. For an elite group of troops your team mates are as dumb as dingos. They often put themselves in the way of certain death, never taking cover, sometimes refuse to obey the most obvious of instructions and under no circumstances do they ever take the incentive to do anything whatsoever themselves. Controlling them is frustratingly imprecise and stupidly limited. You can select recon mode or assualt mode (both have exactly the same result), send them to a specified location or get them to follow you... and thats it. After a few hours of play I came to the conclusion that the best way to go was to leave them somewhere safe and get on with the mission yourself.For a game that claims to place so much emphasis on tactics there really is little overall that you can do aside from run and gun. Trying to flank, create a base of fire, decoy etc are all rendered impossible by the useless control system once the bullets start flying. By the time you have selected a different weapon from the menu and rallied your team around you you will have almost certainly been killed by the unfeasibly accurate mexican rebels who target you and only you at any range even if you expose a single pixel of your character.Add to this a banal storyline set in a decidedly unthreatening Mexican near-future scenario and the total inability to explore any interior locations and you have what will probably go down in history as one of the most dreary and disappointing releases on the Xbox 360.This really isn't what a state of the art, top-titled video game should be like in 2006. One to avoid.

Fast paced action with a great arsenal of weapons I love it but you could make it so you control a whole squad or a tank now THAT would be great

ok

Great