My initial impressions of GR:AW...
The Ghost Recon series of games, much like the Rainbow Six games, have a strong following, but are generally pretty terrible, in my experience. The original Ghost Recon pissed me off so bad, I actually hurled the CD into a wall and shattered it. It was an incredibly shoddy game, no matter what reviewers might try to claim. All of these games suffer from the whole “I know this has to be fun, I'll just keep pounding my head on a wall until I make it so.” In this respect, GR:AW is much the same. It's a shame, because I think what happens, is that people like me will buy any modern tactical shooter that comes out, simply because the genre is so appealing. This makes the desigers think they're onto something, when really, they're not.
The major failing of the original Ghost Recon was that your elite teammates were neither elite, nor really even teammates. In that version you could play from the perspective of anyone on your team (you cannot in this one), so you could take a guy, place him in a machine gun nest, crouching safely with a good field of fire, and then issue the “do not fucking move for any reason” order. Then you'd jump into some other guy, and while you were looking where to send him, you'd hear the anguished cries of the first guy, who the second you left control of him, had wandered out of the safe bunker, eaten some psychoactive berries, and then staggered into a minefield. Or, whatever, something very similar. In short, the AI would take control of any soldier you weren't running, and try to kill him. The game basically consisted of trying to find safe places to hide your teammates, and then soloing the mission. If you got injured enough, you'd hide that guy somewhere, and bring in another.
GR:AW has greatly improved upon this. Your teammates are certainly not bright, and only marginally helpful, but they are not overtly suicidal. They suffer from a number of deficiencies. First, they're extremely unlikely to go exactly where they tell you, or face in a useful direction. By using your tactical map, you can avert some of these problems, but they're still relatively likely to end up 20 yards from where you sent them, staring at a wall. Despite this, they will periodically perform admirably, and go where they're told, look where they're told, and even shoot at enemies that come where they can see. They are not at all proactive, and not too good at using cover, but they're actually beneficial to the overall effort, rather than the major hindrance to your success.
Enemy AI is similar. Very static and not at all clever.
The tactical map, which is the most effective way to get your team to set up where you want, is a nice feature. It appears to be a fully rendered top down view of the battlefield as if looking from a satellite. It's neat to see tracers flashing back and forth, the muzzle flashes of enemies, the little details. It's a good and effective touch, and is one of the most successful parts of the game, especially when combined with the expansive maps...
The maps, which cover Mexico City, are very large, and give no impression at all of artificial boundaries. Since you're always heading for a waypoint of some sort, the game can direct you to stay where it wants, but even if you want to detour laterally by a block or two, you still never feel as if you're being blocked off from anything. It does give the impression of being in a huge, open ended city.
The graphics engine is also very good, though extremely demanding. It's finally pushed me into buying an entirely new gaming machine, perhaps not so much for GR:AW, but for the new generation of highly demanding games. Oblivion was a hint, but GR:AW told me it was time. In any case, the graphics seem very good, with nice particle effects, lighting, shadows, etc. Even on my relatively mid-level machine, it runs decently well until the fire gets heavy, and there's a bit of a slideshow. Character models are nice, weapon models are nice... Not a huge leap forward, but competent, and keeping up with the times.
This is one of the first games I've seen that promotes the new PhysX coprocessor cards that purport to add more physics processing power for demanding games. Supposedly this will help with big explosions and particle effects. In game, the physics engine is generally unremarkable, with a few exceptions. The enemy's ragdoll physics are decent, but a bit disappointing. They fall down in a ragdoll fashion, but once down, they seem to lock in place. Additional impacts don't shift them. Even as they fall, they tend to just collapse, there's no real sense of impact from incoming fire. There's also the usual debris that skitters away as your foot strikes it. There are some neat moments, though. In one situtation, I fired a 40mm grenade into the side of a light armored car. The explosion blew the tires off that side, put a realistic dent decal in the door (which now hung open), and canted the car down appropriately for the impact. In other situations, I've seen vehicles take incoming fire and tremble with the impact, their alarms might go off as well. It's not clear if I was hallucinating, but I thought I also saw gunfire blow the tire out of a truck, complete with a loud pop, and it settled down on the deflated tire. Some very immersive moments thanks to the quality of the physics and graphics.
The only real problem as far as physics go, are the grenades. This game has one of the most ridiculously unintuitive and problematic hand grenade interfaces I've ever seen. The grenades themselves behave ridiculously, sometimes floating like balloons and airbursting, sometimes rebounding crazily. Launched grenades are much better and more rewarding, though these too had issues. I found that they'd often strike a low ledge if I was firing over one, and sorta bounce up land land on their sides. It's interesting that the game seems to demand that the grenade strike point first in order to detonate, but the frequency with which this happens is bizzare.
Sound is supposed to be amazing, but I am not particularly impressed. I had to turn EAX off to get my own gun's reports to even work. This may be the fault of my ridiculously aged speakers. The game might be expecting a surround sound set I simply don't have. I've never really been able to pick out games with great sound, I just know that Rainbow Six really sucked. I think new speakers might be in order.
All the bells and whistles make this game a whole lot more interesting than the previous ones, but they don't do much to alleviate the fact that the game is generally arbitrary, frustrating and unrewarding. The first problem is that this is a “checkpoint” game. No manual saves. You play until the game decides you've gone far enough to get a save. The space between checkpoints can be enough to make this feature very, very irritating, especially since it tends to save after a fight, and not before. Every time you die, you have to run all the friggin way back to the next cluster of enemies.
It's also a very arbitrary game. Go to a given corner, and peek around. Sometimes that guy in the machine gun nest will just sit there like an idiot, and let you shoot him in the face. Sometimes he'll smoke you the second you even peek. Then, you load a save, and you set up crossing fields of covering fire on him, and then you peek and he smokes you. So, you basically just keep trying the same shit, over and over, roll the dice however many times, and hope to clear the checkpoint. Certainly you can see situations where your team supports you, and you maneuver and blast a guy, but a painfully large number of times you just get blown away for doing nothing wrong. When you can't save, this becomes extremely troublesome.
All that reloading also encourages/forces a lot of metagame bullshit, and to some extent that's what this game boils down to. You memorize where the enemies are, and maybe find a spot where all their shots hit a particular lamp post, while you can snipe them in the shoulder and kill them. There's really very little tactical play, and pretty much never a fight that can be won the first time, just through sound tactical practices. You have to run in, get killed, and get an idea of how things lay out. Then you go in again, and get a little further, and figure out where you can send your guys that they can help a bit and not die. Then you go in again. Again... Again... etc. I dunno, maybe I'm a dipshit, and I don't understand small squad tactics, but then again I absolutely rape people in games like BF2, CS, etc, and I did just fine in games like BIA that have decent squad AI, so I can't be that much of a dope. I think the game is just excessively difficult, and forces a sort of “Kings Quest” type of “guess what arcane bullshit the game wants from you” scenario. For example, while fighting in a parking garage, and trying to take out the infantry guarding a tank, I found that they were lethally accurate and totally impossible to engage when I tried it from the top level of the structure, but if I went down to the second level, I was much more able to pick them off, and they seemed unable to see me as much. Tactically speaking, elevation is an advantage, but it took me a half dozen reloads, all with a tremendously enjoyable 45 second run up to the top, over to get the rocket launcher, shooting the snipers, etc., to find out the game had decided that it was a tactical shooter that doesn't care about actual tactics so much as exploiting odd foibles of the engine.
In the end, even victory is disappointing, as it feels more like you're exploiting the game's rather flat and uninteresting enemy AI, than actually using tactics. I often find myself moving my team into positions just to give myself the illusion that there's some squad based fighting going on
I look forward to giving it a second try on a more powerful machine with better speakers, and I'm definitely impressed with the features, but the game, at its core, is still the ridiculously over-difficult, meta-game crap that the first one was, and for that reason it can never hold a candle to games like EIB, Far Cry and FEAR, which made combat fun, flowing and varied, rather than stilted, repetitive and tiresome.