Please note that this is a review of the PC version of GRAW2 which differs significantly from its console counterpart.
I love the idea of playing a good tactical first person shooter (a real one I mean, not Call of Duty or Gears of War) but good ones are very hard to find. Almost every game in the genre is plagued by bugs, incompetent AI, poor level design or other problems that basically ruin what - in many cases - might otherwise have been exceptional gaming experiences. These problems have steered me away from most of the shooters with "Tom Clancy" in their titles, but I recently noticed GRAW2 on sale at the very reasonable price of £10 and I decided that, for a tenner, I'd give it a go.
Frankly, I wish I hadn't. GRAW2 does so many things so badly that it's difficult to know where to start this review. Normally I'd start with a spoiler-free overview of the game's setting and plot but in this case it might lead to me talking at length about how badly GRAW2 delivers its storyline to the player, and since that really is the least of this game's problems (especially as this isn't the sort of game that anyone is going to play for it's storyline) I'd rather focus on other things. Let it suffice for me to say that it's the year 2014 and you play as the leader of a sqaud of "Ghosts" (fictional elite U.S. soldiers) who are sent into Mexico to sort out some bad people who might have weapons of mass destruction. GRAW2 follows on directly from GRAW but you don't need to have played GRAW to get what's going on here.
GRAW2's campaign consists of about a dozen missions, each of which require you to meet a few simple objectives. Before each mission you get to choose which of your Ghosts to take with you (each Ghost has a different role such as Sniper or Rifleman) and what sort of weapons to equip them with. You're also given some intel (such as the sort of opposition you can expect) and, occasionally, a choice of drop zones. You can spend as much or as little time as you like here; each mission provides you with an appropriate default loadout that you can just accept immediately if you want to get straight into the action.
Once on the ground you can command your Ghosts using a variety of methods. These include the ability to issue commands directly from your HUD (for example, you can point your crosshair at a patch of ground and click some buttons to make one of your men go to that location) and a tactical map that gives you a real-time top-down view of the area and lets you issue commands RTS-style (and even lets you queue commands, which is nice) but I found all the available methods to be somewhat unwieldy. Anyone who has experienced a really slick interface (such as the one in SWAT4) will wonder what the developers of GRAW2 have been smoking, but - as with the story - this again is not the real problem in GRAW2. The user interface may be clunky but it is functional (barely) and I should think that many players (myself included) would be able to overlook the poor UI design if there were a good game to be played here.
There isn't. GRAW2's gameplay is a never-ending succession of bugs and bad design choices, and it's here that the game really falls apart. Your Ghosts, for example, are spectacularly stupid. Pathfinding and line-of-sight determination are the most frequent problems (and when I say frequent, I mean all the time) with the latter being perhaps the most annoying: sometimes your men will fail to return fire even though they have a line of sight (which results in them standing still while they get shot to death) and sometimes they'll fire when they don't have a line of sight (which results in them firing into a wall, which at best wastes precious ammo and at worst gets them killed because they fired a detonate-on-impact grenade). Then there's the level design, which makes GRAW2 feel more like a sniper game than a tactical shooter. There are precious few opportunities for any use of tactics here; mostly you'll be sneaking and peeking around corners to see if there are any snipers or machine guns waiting to take you out before zooming in and shooting them in the face. This has no repercussions because most enemies are completely static and will have little (if any) reaction to seeing/hearing their buddies getting killed. There are hardly ever any options for sending your men in other than a full frontal assault, which is a recipe for distaster, so the best thing to do with your men is to keep them some distance behind you (covering your back, where the lack of any enemy flanking manouvers will ensure that they're completely useless) while you pick off your witless foes one by one. You do have the option to play each mission solo, and this is made very tempting by the sheer incompetence of your squad, but unfortunately it's not really viable. The game sometimes throws a scripted "defend this area" section at you and in these sections you'll need your men to take up the conveniently placed defensive positions or you'll be in trouble. You'll also need them for taking out vehicles because you can only carry one anti-vehicle missile each, and several of the missions will throw more than one vehicle at you. But if it wasn't for those things then I would't think twice about leaving my Ghosts at home, and that surely is the kiss of death for a supposedly "tactical" shooter.
If GRAW2 had its bugs fixed, its AI reprogrammed, and its UI and missions both completely redesigned, then there'd be a good game here... but that would be a game without any of GRAW2 left in it.
I love the idea of playing a good tactical first person shooter (a real one I mean, not Call of Duty or Gears of War) but good ones are very hard to find. Almost every game in the genre is plagued by bugs, incompetent AI, poor level design or other problems that basically ruin what - in many cases - might otherwise have been exceptional gaming experiences. These problems have steered me away from most of the shooters with "Tom Clancy" in their titles, but I recently noticed GRAW2 on sale at the very reasonable price of £10 and I decided that, for a tenner, I'd give it a go.
Frankly, I wish I hadn't. GRAW2 does so many things so badly that it's difficult to know where to start this review. Normally I'd start with a spoiler-free overview of the game's setting and plot but in this case it might lead to me talking at length about how badly GRAW2 delivers its storyline to the player, and since that really is the least of this game's problems (especially as this isn't the sort of game that anyone is going to play for it's storyline) I'd rather focus on other things. Let it suffice for me to say that it's the year 2014 and you play as the leader of a sqaud of "Ghosts" (fictional elite U.S. soldiers) who are sent into Mexico to sort out some bad people who might have weapons of mass destruction. GRAW2 follows on directly from GRAW but you don't need to have played GRAW to get what's going on here.
GRAW2's campaign consists of about a dozen missions, each of which require you to meet a few simple objectives. Before each mission you get to choose which of your Ghosts to take with you (each Ghost has a different role such as Sniper or Rifleman) and what sort of weapons to equip them with. You're also given some intel (such as the sort of opposition you can expect) and, occasionally, a choice of drop zones. You can spend as much or as little time as you like here; each mission provides you with an appropriate default loadout that you can just accept immediately if you want to get straight into the action.
Once on the ground you can command your Ghosts using a variety of methods. These include the ability to issue commands directly from your HUD (for example, you can point your crosshair at a patch of ground and click some buttons to make one of your men go to that location) and a tactical map that gives you a real-time top-down view of the area and lets you issue commands RTS-style (and even lets you queue commands, which is nice) but I found all the available methods to be somewhat unwieldy. Anyone who has experienced a really slick interface (such as the one in SWAT4) will wonder what the developers of GRAW2 have been smoking, but - as with the story - this again is not the real problem in GRAW2. The user interface may be clunky but it is functional (barely) and I should think that many players (myself included) would be able to overlook the poor UI design if there were a good game to be played here.
There isn't. GRAW2's gameplay is a never-ending succession of bugs and bad design choices, and it's here that the game really falls apart. Your Ghosts, for example, are spectacularly stupid. Pathfinding and line-of-sight determination are the most frequent problems (and when I say frequent, I mean all the time) with the latter being perhaps the most annoying: sometimes your men will fail to return fire even though they have a line of sight (which results in them standing still while they get shot to death) and sometimes they'll fire when they don't have a line of sight (which results in them firing into a wall, which at best wastes precious ammo and at worst gets them killed because they fired a detonate-on-impact grenade). Then there's the level design, which makes GRAW2 feel more like a sniper game than a tactical shooter. There are precious few opportunities for any use of tactics here; mostly you'll be sneaking and peeking around corners to see if there are any snipers or machine guns waiting to take you out before zooming in and shooting them in the face. This has no repercussions because most enemies are completely static and will have little (if any) reaction to seeing/hearing their buddies getting killed. There are hardly ever any options for sending your men in other than a full frontal assault, which is a recipe for distaster, so the best thing to do with your men is to keep them some distance behind you (covering your back, where the lack of any enemy flanking manouvers will ensure that they're completely useless) while you pick off your witless foes one by one. You do have the option to play each mission solo, and this is made very tempting by the sheer incompetence of your squad, but unfortunately it's not really viable. The game sometimes throws a scripted "defend this area" section at you and in these sections you'll need your men to take up the conveniently placed defensive positions or you'll be in trouble. You'll also need them for taking out vehicles because you can only carry one anti-vehicle missile each, and several of the missions will throw more than one vehicle at you. But if it wasn't for those things then I would't think twice about leaving my Ghosts at home, and that surely is the kiss of death for a supposedly "tactical" shooter.
If GRAW2 had its bugs fixed, its AI reprogrammed, and its UI and missions both completely redesigned, then there'd be a good game here... but that would be a game without any of GRAW2 left in it.
