Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter (GRAW)

Tactical Shooters are a bit tough to enjoy if you’re used to run-and-gun stuff like Painkiller or Serious Sam. You need a lot of patience, have to constantly look around every nook and corner before you progress, conserve your ammo and make sure every shot counts. Thanks to games like SWAT 4 and Rainbow Six, I’ve grown accustomed to tactical shooters so I wasn’t totally bamboozled while playing GRAW. The game is pretty much your standard Tom Clancy espionage crap that has you leading a team of ‘Ghosts’ in Mexico to make sure a certain faction of terrorists end up in their respective body-bags. The game puts you in charge of your squad of three at all times and during certain missions you even have a drone at your command that gives you an aerial view of the surrounding area. Move your squad to a particular area (extremely carefully), clear out all the enemies, move to the next area and repeat. The game tends to get a bit monotonous after a while and only having Mexico City (the streets to be precise) as your playground doesn’t help either. Squad AI isn’t all that bad and they do help you out in certain situations, but at times they’ll go totally ‘jehadi’ and get themselves killed. Another annoying part in this game is the absence of a manual save, which leaves you at the mercy of un-evenly placed checkpoints. Visually the game is pretty cool, but the ironical part here is that even though most of the game looks pretty brown, the system requirements will make you and your PC cringe. Oblivion was a GPU killer, but even that ran smoother than GRAW. High end cards like the 7900GTX cannot turn the texture resolution to the max (can I get a WTF?) and the much-hyped AGEIA physics engine is pretty meh (at least in this game), as you can only destroy vehicles and a couple of boxes and fences. Overall, the game is enjoyable even though it’s plagued by a lot of nuisances. Ubisoft has released an official patch that may smothen things out that’s up for grabs at the game’s official site.