Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 review

The missions themselves are more diverse and memorable as well. One will find you creeping through a candle-lit urban cemetery, using night vision and camera guns to silently snipe around tombstones, while the very next will be an explosive, adrenaline-fueled race through the desert with no team and no technology to help you reach the extraction point. Depth and volume have been added to the maps, with formerly flat city blocks expanded to include accessible rooftops or tunnels and formerly drab canyons complicated with caves or bridges. Each new geographic wrinkle offers a possible new approach for successfully tackling the level.

And encouraging you to attempt all those different strategies are the improved GRAW tools and gadgets. Beyond the addition of the sturdy MULE, a kind of armored storage locker-on-wheels at which you can reload, switch weapons or even duck for cover, that improvement can best be summarized with two words: full screen. Both the picture-in-picture Cross Com, which displays your teammates' perspective, and the hovering UAV drone, which displays a top down perspective, can now be watched and controlled in full screen view.

The tweak sounds superficial, but in reality, broadens the scope of the gameplay quite a bit. In the first GRAW, scoping out the battlefield with the UAV or your squad, red "intel" diamond by red "intel" diamond, could take more time and guesswork than it was worth. When you can see exactly what they see, however, pre-planning an attack becomes a breeze... almost as enjoyable as the actual combat itself. You can potentially locate every enemy on the map and then position your men to wipe out all of them without moving your character an inch from the starting point. If the whole goal of tactical shooters is to stimulate your brain as well as your trigger finger, GRAW 2 has made another big stride in that direction with this seemingly small modification.