Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter

By: Dusty Stokes

Platform: Xbox 360

Publisher: Ubisoft Developer: Red Storm

ESRB Rating: Rating Pending Genre: Action

I am ready to go to war -- just as long as you send me in with a floating hover camera thing to help out. Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced War Fighter (GRAW) is ready to take your Xbox 360 and make a man out of it. Squad commands are simple and straightforward, weapons feel good, and a high tech cord comes out of your helmet down to the comm portion of your pack. Teammates follow close behind you and scramble under cover when you order them into position or have them regroup, and the eye-in-the-sky UAV Cypher drone makes creepy hover noises when it's around. Let's look at what's hot here.

First, most importantly, here's a game that looks and sounds like it was actually made for your 360. Despite a few minor inconsistencies -- like a sheet of glass reflecting the city behind you but not you standing in front of it -- you get boat loads -- huge English boats, mind -- of next-gen graphics and audio.

Where Call of Duty 2 plunged you into WWII and left you with no doubt what the frozen hell of an icy Russian winter was, GRAW drops you whole into a slightly futuristic Mexico City to deal with the repercussions of an agreement for joint policing with the U.S. Within moments, you've lost your contact, sent up the hover-droid to hunt him down, blown up a small convoy of soft targets, and spent a really reasonable amount of time behind as much cover as you could grab.

The much dreaded target outline system isn't nearly as disruptive to the gameplay as you might think, and the CROSS-COM -- despite not always featuring quite the angle we'd like to see from -- lets you command the Cypher, your squad, and support units easily and quickly.

Ghost Recon has never been a series that's relied on its single-player gameplay to sell itself, but with the recent entries in the series it's certainly been heading in that direction, and GRAW looks like the strongest case yet of a game that can do just that. Multiplayer is still a key component of the game, but this looks to be the first game in the Ghost Recon series where you could justifiably want to buy it without any intentions of even playing the multiplayer portions -- and that's something to look forward to.