Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter Preview

When a two-year-old last-generation game and a downloadable arcade shoot-em-up are widely considered the most fun to be had online via an Xbox 360, there’s an obvious gap waiting to be filled. Ubisoft hope to capitalise with the latest incarnation of Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon, dubbed Advanced Warfighter, or GRAW as it’s known by those familiar with the game.

We sat down with North Carolina developers Red Storm, who have a separate team working exclusively on the multiplayer aspect of the game, for an impressive hands-on preview across ten 360s, each blessed with a HDTV. And sweet it was too.

GRAW looks every part a next-generation game. Graphically it’s stunning. The HUD is all futuristic urban Ghost, providing a view of the battlefield Ubisoft believe will become reality in 2013. Colour coded outlines on enemies and team-mates, and windows popping up all over the place with real-time information only adds to the futuristic Universal Soldier style. But after a couple of hours with the game, you see through the next-generation bells and whistles, and what remains of GRAW is a tense, solid team-based shooter.

Each of the ten maps, all based on actual areas outside Mexico City, support 16 players at once. Variety is the order of the day – expect environments spanning rural, desert, beach, urban, junkyard and ship deck areas. Oh yeah, there’s a temple map as well.

Fans of the series will be thankful that Ghost Recon’s trademark tactical squad-based shooting still forms the nuts and bolts of the game. It would have been easy to simply tick the online play feature box by providing elimination and territory modes and allowing mass carnage to ensue, but Red Storm has concentrated on making the online experience a tense, tactical battle of wills. And it benefits as a result.

The first thing that strikes you while waiting in the lobby is the sheer magnitude of options available. There are over 1,300 possible custom game modes. Eat that Halo 2. All the standard modes are included, from solo elimination to team territory battles and objective-based missions; Ghost Recon fan favourite siege makes a welcome return too. But why stick to the pre-sets when there’s so much scope for customisation? One of the best is the facility to adjust the number of respawns a player has. Previously, only two options – none or infinite – were available. Now the game host can set it to whatever he or she wants.

Before you get to any of that jazz, players need to get their hands dirty and create their Ghost. The main consideration is class. Choose between rifleman, grenadier, automatic rifleman and marksman. They follow standard videogame conventions – riflemen are all-rounders, marksmen are excellent snipers. Skills in these areas come in the form of attribute bonuses, but your class doesn’t restrict your weapon selection. So if you fancy yourself a keen eye from a hundred paces, that doesn’t mean you can’t get up close for some shotgun shenanigans; your Ghost just won’t be tailored for it.

Online play in any game is part skill, part looking cool. Looking good while taking a rocket up the ass dulls the blow somewhat. In GRAW, you could potentially spend a few days customising the look of your character. From headgear to facial camouflage, anything goes, although Red Storm was at pains to stress that all the gear is authentic stuff. Also available is the opportunity to aesthetically code team members, for added cool factor, or for mass camouflage.

The mass of options might suggest that random games might prove unplayable. Red Storm told us that hardcore Ghost Recon fans can learn maps effectively enough to cope with any custom options that are set by the game host. Like some players in World of Warcraft who remove all their armour and weapons, class modifications can be turned off to force everyone to battle it out on a level playing field.

The pre-game lobby allows only the game host to change options. However, all players see the same menu as the host, to make it easy for everyone to learn how to host a game. The first game we played was a complete free-for-all, just to get the juices flowing – Siege on Hamburger Hill, which is a grassy area with a base in the middle. Unlimited respawns = ten Rambos running around like headless chickens. Savage.

One of GRAW’s unique selling points is the Cross-Com, a small window that appears in the top left of the HUD. It provides a birds-eye view of the map based on the sight of a drone that can be ordered to scout the enemy, revealing their positions as diamonds. It can also be used to see through the eyes of your team-mates and to flag up enemy positions and weak spots. The Cross-Com proved to be a key part of strategic play, but at this stage we were more concerned with some murder/death/killing.

As soon as you spawn you pick from an armoury including shotguns, automatics and distance weapons. The trick here is to adapt to what is going on in the map and pick the weapon that is most needed at the time, whilst considering your attribute bonuses. So, for example, if you are a rifleman, and your base is under siege, pick a close combat weapon and get stuck in.

Fans of Ghost Recon 2 will be familiar with the off-the-shoulder camera position. Love it or hate it, it has become GR staple. I found that the first-person view (which doesn’t have a weapon model) to be more effective, but it’s really down to preference. Player movement is a little slow, but after a while you barely notice it. The targeting reticule also moves slowly, and there seemed to be no facility to speed up the sensitivity in the options menu. Hopefully this will be addressed in the final release.

A couple of new tricks can be used to help you survive. A new dive move allows you to jump forwards and take to the floor in double quick time, and once behind cover you can peek out for a sneaky look while still being protected from bullets. A useful technique I discovered fairly early on is crawling, which makes you harder to spot and harder to shoot. For accuracy, you can slow down your soldier’s movement to a stalk, which focuses the targeting reticule. This seems to be the best way of taking out enemies, especially when equipped with inaccurate automatics.

The feel of the weapons is impressive. They have substance, which is essential in any weapon-based game, and vibrate the 360 pad convincingly. As you would expect, each weapon feels different too. Automatic rifles are best sprayed at mid-distance rapidly moving targets, while you can whip out the sniper rifle for headshot satisfaction.

Thumbs appropriately warmed up, it was time for some territory action (pretty much your standard King of the Hill game type), again on Hamburger Hill. By this time, after grasping the control system, GRAW actually became a lot of fun. The main base was the territory, and it – as it tends to in these games – became a death trap, but yours truly lobbed a few grenades in and hit the deck, picking off anyone silly enough to chance their arm with a few well aimed shots from an automatic rifle.

Talking of grenades, GRAW forces players to stand still when lobbing them. In an already slow-paced game, this ‘enforced sitting duck’ proves annoying. An appropriately skilled enemy has no trouble unloading a clip in your face before the pin hits the ground.

But none of this macho stuff is the way Ghost Recon is meant to be played, and certainly not what hardcore fans enjoy. GRAW isn’t a stop-gap to Halo 3 online after all. The next map we tried showed Ghost Recon for what it truly is – chess with automatic rifles.

Team territory on Wharf was the most fun I had during the play test. All ten players were divided up into two teams. Red Storm, as the game host, set up three territories, A, B and C in various parts of the map, which acted as controllable territory. With each second a territory is controlled, the team scores points, and the team with most points at the end wins.

Red Storm told us intelligence is the key to team-based success on Live and so it proved. On team territory the drone came into its own. Territory B was under a wooden pier, which yours truly controlled with such skill that the performance will be etched into the annals of play test history.

For pure suspense, the next game proved king. A grudge match between the assortment of game journos and Ubisoft’s resident team of female gamers, The Frag Dolls (for £20 HMV vouchers!) bordered on the epic. Red Storm only gave each player three lives, which did nothing for sanity. Four vs. four, team elimination – and sweet it was too. Yes Frag Dolls lost, but it came down to the last player on each team. Yours truly would have helped in the end game if it hadn’t been for an ill-advised team-kill. It was in this match that the Cross-Comm proved its worth, primarily for scouting enemies.

Scouring the dusty tracks of Mexico, hiding behind grating, chancing a rush for higher ground, all the while hoping an enemy sniper doesn’t prize away your final respawn, is adrenaline pumping stuff.

There are, however, disappointments. Ubisoft told us they will not be offering clan support. This seems strange. Why devote an entire development team to the online multiplayer and not facilitate clan support? Long-term online gaming is driven by hardcore clans and guilds. Without adequate support, GRAW might start well on Live but then fall away.

Although it doesn’t compensate for this omission, Red Storm is looking to support the multiplayer experience through Xbox Live Marketplace, which suggests downloadable content. Whether it will prove enough of a draw to keep players online remains to be seen.

GRAW online is shaping up to be a polished, tactical experience. Certainly the potential is there for it to be the most popular game played on Xbox Live this year. Nothing immediately strikes as being revolutionary. The Cross-Comm is clever, but doesn’t push the boundaries of what online shooters are about. Where GRAW excels is in often nerve-shatteringly tense stand-offs. Compare this to Halo 2 for example, which often descends into a mindless bloodbath, and Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter offers an extremely attractive change of pace.