Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter review

While GRAW's storyline takes a little while to grab you, it slowly builds up your acquaintance to the characters and then delivers wild twists that completely broadside you with disaster after disaster. Here's the setup: upstart General Carlos Ontiveros has staged a massive coup on the Mexican government that includes a daring assault on the American embassy in Mexico City. As Scott Mitchell, the leader of Ghost Team, you must rescue those trapped at the embassy and halt Ontiveros's scheme of world (or at least Mexican) domination. It's a simple hook, but it doesn't take long for everything to fall apart. Once the bullets start whizzing and fighting gets thick, it's just one staggering problem after the next. Just when you think your mission has been accomplished, something extremely pivotal to your success explodes in a ball of fire that knocks you to the ground ... and it happens over and over again.

You're not without tools, however, and your repertoire of weapons gives you a chance against the hordes of Mexican rebels hurling live ammo and Spanish curses at you. Set in the near future, GRAW gives you the most technologically-advanced gear that the geatest world superpower has to offer. Your Cross-com (a little communications window in the upper left-hand corner of your vision) patches you into every other unit even remotely related to your situation, including: the squad-mates under your command, commanding officers, heavies like tanks and Apache helicopters and even a little remote-controlled drone that can scout out dangerous areas that lie ahead.

As a professional soldier, you can execute a variety of maneuvers like vaulting low obstacles, diving into a prone position and taking cover behind virtually any vertically flat surface - all of which you must perform with alarming frequency if you hope to survive. As though you didn't have enough munitions delivery systems (aka guns), you can always snake weapons from your fallen victims and use them yourself.