Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 (PC)

I was really excited about getting my hands on GRAW 2 for the PC, since I’ve grown weary of shooters that are too easy and require no tact. GRAW 1 was pleasantly challenging at times, and really tough at others (which wasn’t such a bad thing, or so I thought), but it became a little boring after I got half way through the game; needless to say, I expected more from GRAW 2. After I played a preview build of the game, I was pretty disappointed with the performance issues and the erratic AI – the good news is that the performance issues have been solved; the bad news is that although it isn’t as bad as the preview build, the AI still sucks.

In a tactical shooter such as GRAW 2, timing and execution are the most crucial factors of success, in which case you need your teammates to be quick, lethal (at least as lethal as the enemy) and precise. Instead, what I got was a bunch of lazy morons who’d take ages to traverse even a straight road with no enemies, leaving me alone in the heat of battle tones of times – this affected my experience pretty badly, since it forced me to wait for my dumbf**k AI controlled teammates, slowing down the pace of the game like hell and making me lose the feel of recon warfare.

Another disappointment was that the control system wasn’t as robust as the Xbox 360 version of the game. Now I haven’t played too much of the 360 version, but the short while I spent with the game really kept me craving for more. The control system there was very well designed, responsive and most importantly easy to pickup (with a little practice). In the PC version however, the squad commands and the CrossCom felt pretty awkward and left a lot to be desired. In its console counterpart the CrossCom (the system that connects the Ghosts) was an integral part of the gameplay, while on the PC it just felt like another feature that was shoved into the game at the last minute, since it lacked the functionality and polish of the 360 version.
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I can understand that they’ve made the PC version tactical and the 360 version more action oriented, but I feel they should have made the PC counterpart a little more forgiving; you cannot take more than a shot or two from the enemy before you succumb to your injuries in the PC version, and no matter how quick you are, you’re sure to get shot every now and then and reload from a checkpoint. For me, the game lost its charm somewhere between its quick loads and the crazy amounts of times I died without any warning. To make it even harder they’ve ensured that you don’t heal at resupply points like you do in the 360 version, which makes the game anally hard and frustrating at times.

After playing a long chunk of the frustratingly unforgiving campaign, I decided to play the co-op maps for a while. Unfortunately for me, the co-op missions were equally tough and my teammate and I had to respawn time and time again after we’d died at the hands of unrealistic odds. I won’t say that it wasn’t fun, but it was so only for the first 5 minutes (5 minutes = around 10-15 deaths by the way). After that it was just downright frustrating since the game didn’t give us the tools it did in the single player campaign to cope with the difficulty, such as the UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) to help spot enemies, without which it was impossible to know what’s around the next corner.

With GRAW 2, the GRAW PC series has moved from pleasantly challenging to truly unforgiving, draining the joy out of the gameplay like a bloodthirsty mosquito. If you have the patience to deal with cumbersome AI and unforgiving gameplay, you might be able to play to game, but I doubt you’d enjoy yourself. GRAW 2 on the Xbox 360 is a much better investment in my opinion, so if you have to choose between those two, it should be a no-brainer.