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Fun...But the original has it beat.....

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: December 17, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Ghost Recon 2 is a very fun game but the strategy involved was taken out. You now are in the game under 3rd person view. You can no longer control every member of your team. Once you die, the mission is over, unless you have saved often, which I recommend. Now on the positive side, the game is very addicting. The missions are challenging and the multiplayer is great if you have multiple friends over. I recommend this game to anyone who loves a good shooter, as well as the $20 pricetag.

Could definitely have been better.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: February 15, 2006
Author: Amazon User

By now it goes without saying that GR2 bears little resemblance to the original incarnation of the game, or even the console ports of it. It's really less a sequel and more a Rainbow 6: Black Arrow, for Ghost Recon. Which is to say: a game that's acceptably faithful to the original but clearly engineered for consoles rather than the PC.

The core design isn't really the problem with this game as, for the most part, it plays pretty well and still manages to convey an authentic GR experience; even if it does lack some of the finer points. Unfortunately as with Black Arrow, your squadmates are pretty much fixed so there's no element of strategy to the pre-game aside from picking your own loadout. Multiplayer options abound and I think the only thing I found lacking about the off-campaign missions was the inability to run a Firefight with a squad to back you up or to use something besides US weaponry in general. It seems the only place you get to play with the foreign hardware is in the true multiplayer modes.

While I was initially quite disappointed to see how stripped down GR2 ended up being in general, it works, so I can't objectively count that against it. With that aside there ultimately ends up being a good number of other things beneath the surface that serve to hinder overall enjoyment.

If you've played the original GR you can vouch for the fact that your squadmates were often the first to pick out and gun down enemies, more often than not before you even knew they were there. It seems that your new squad of ghosts are a bit on the nearsighted side as they generally end up doing exactly the opposite. Compound this with some occasionally schitzophrenic pathfinding and you have a recipe for annoyance. Teammates who randomly run across your field of fire, take cover behind something that occludes their shot of an enemy, or... just not shooting at them at all. The AI commands are pretty limited and none seem to be especially useful aside from "surpress". Telling your mates to flank often just sends them off wandering in a random direction and "hold" seems to wear off by itself and send your little buddies hurrying off to find where ever you've gone in their absence. As a side note, "hold fire" strikes me as almost entirely useless due to the fact that any element of stealth within the game is all but broken and works on only the most basic of levels.

Your opposition on the other hand seems to have no problem finding cover, falling back and repositioning to get the drop on you. The enemy AI isn't brilliant, but its enough to be challenging without a few of the game's more annoying mechanics backing them up. First of these is the fact that enemies will indeed spawn out of thin air. You think you've cleared the area behind you on the way to an objective? Well, you probably did, but now there is inexplicably a hail of bullets comming from that direction. Now make no mistake, the original GR -did- do things like this on occasion but in GR2 it seems to be much more of a staple, or thorn, to the point that its readilly noticable and becomes expected that you can pretty much never safely turn your back. Somewhat in line with this is the fact that when enemies -do- start crawling out of the woodwork (and I don't mean on missions where they're supposed to) they tend to do so in mass numbers. Even in its stripped down form, GR is still not well suited as a by-the-numbers shooter; especially when you have half-braindead AI backing you up.

The mission design is superficially pretty well-varied but alot of the missions end up boiling down to, "go here and protect this from 100 enemies that are swarming out of the treeline". The new "Defend" mode is built around this idea but there are also a few others which place you in the same position. Some of the maps are more linear than others, though once you take into account the randomly spawn-reinforced opposition you may come to appreciate them more than the wider open ones where you're more or less a sitting duck waiting to be ambushed from an area you just cleared out.

The only real "enhancement" to the game, also exacerbates one of its most annoying quirks. The M29 (and that other one, I can't think of right now) are pretty neat little toys that can make it feel more like you're playing Kill.switch than Ghost Recon 2, but they're not without their downside. Though it seems to be more of an issue when using 3rd person, the problem can also crop up in 1st person as well. Your launched grenades (this does apply to any underslung grenade launcher, its just more problematic with the unique aiming of the IWS rifles) seem to have a really large collision box. This basically means that its really easy to unwittingly grenade yourself in the face when behind cover.

I think that's enough ranting so in summary: GR2 could've ultimately been a solid, if stripped down and somewhat halfhearted "sequel", but there's alot of little things counting against it that could be grounds for a good ammount of frustration.

Nice Movements - Problems with AI

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: April 24, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon 2 involves you and a small squad of soldiers going out and achieving objectives. The problem is that your squad is usually not very smart.

Let's start at the beginning. You're a fairly realistic modern day soldier. When you draw your rifle, you actually take it off your back. You can see the radio antennae, the pistol at your hip, and every other detail of your character. When you get down and crawl along the grond, it really looks like that. You can roll sideways, sneak, and more. This isn't an arcade leaping game. It's meant to have you feel like you really are a soldier in these situations.

The training is set up like a real combat training course, so that you learn your commands while staying in character. You try out a number of weapon types as well as learn how to climb over and under obstacles. Then you move on to your missions, which are the typical kill-the-enemy and save-the-good-guys style of tasks.

Unlike Splinter Cell and other solo-stalking games, in Ghost Recon 2 you are working with a small crew to achieve your objectives. This is fantastic if you're playing LIVE and have a team of skilled friends on your side, working in a well choreographed ballet of death. This works less well when you're playing single player and having to depend on the computer AI teammates to watch your back. Sure, they might watch your back - they could be hiding behind a box, refusing to actually fight or do anything helpful.

You could say that this is a problem with any squad based game, but I really did find a few situations in this particular game that stood out as being quite silly. Maybe another month or so in QA testing would have helped work out those bugs. Certainly the AI knew what it was supposed to be doing most of the time - so it shouldn't have been to hard to remove those remaining glitches.

The movement graphics as mentioned are really quite good. The fact that weapons don't "appear out of nowhere", that crawling and moving and rolling all looks quite smooth and realistic is impressive. That being said, the *detail* in the graphics is still lacking a bit. The ground often looks like it's a single tile repeated over and over again. The trees look very fake. I've seen other games of the same genre that have much better detail, so it's certainly possible. Again, this was a case where waiting another month or two in design to get those extra details added could have really made a difference.

I did enjoy the game - I just felt it wasn't as great as it could have been. It's as if they had a deadline to meet, so whatever state the game was in when that deadline came around, that's what went out. I hope that for the next version they will be willing to take those extra weeks to get it to that higher quality level.

Stoping N. Korea.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: May 21, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Imagine this: North Korea is going in to seize Chinese territory after the crazy General blames the Chinese for a great famine that is starting and The Ghost must go in and stop them before major damage happens. Well you don't have to imaging it when you can pick up your copy of ghost Recon 2 for the Xbox.
Ghost Recon 2 is an amazing game that was very well made. First of all, the graphics are great for an Xbox game. The picture is pretty clear and is also well detailed from my point of view. They made the controls very easy to know and learn and understand. The movement of the character is nice and clean for the most part. The only game play issue that I had was that I thought that the game campaign was a little too easy for me. I like challenges in games.
When you play multiplayer, it is very fun. There are some very fun and cool maps like bunkers and query. It is very fun to play with friends only. You will become addicted with the online part of the game. There is one major flaw in the game though. When you are playing Xbox Live ranked games you can earn 5 stars for a rank and then go to sleep and wake up with 3 stars and you had never lost a game. It is very frustrating when you earn your good rank and then you loose for doing nothing. Other than that, the Xbox Live is great. You can play, Sharpshooter, Last Man Standing, Siege and many more. Plus there was an update that went out a while ago with more guns and maps. This is a must check out. I would not recommend renting this game only because it is so good that you should just put up 20 dollars or even 10 for a used copy. This is an amazing game and a great sequel to the ever popular Ghost Recon.

Hit, or Miss?

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: May 23, 2006
Author: Amazon User

If you haven't yet played a Ghost Recon game, Ghost Recon 2 will be some good fun. Up-to date graphics, a fresh story and hours of challenging modern combat is what you should be expecting from this title. I was expected a bit more based on my great experiences with the first Ghosts, which entailed a more tactical approach. And this is where the disappointment begins. The game play: I quickly learned that I no longer have control over customizing my team aside from weapon selection. The whole team is assigned automatically. Yuck! Also, the team is smaller and must face more enemies, armored vehicles and helicopters. These things seem to steer this title away from its roots which is good and bad.

There are so many good elements found in the original GR which are missing here, such as being involved in developing the skills of your team mates. Previously you could send 6 into the field and let them gain valuable experience and make them better. Also missing are bonus objectives that, when successfully completed will unlock new team members and weapons. Another nice feature was winning medals for personal kills during a mission. These, and other features, seem to have vanished. All of it was sacrificed and replaced by a lame point score system that has no effect on your team's performance or outcome of the missions. It only serves to let you obtain images, big deal.

You start with an initial objective in each of GR2's missions, further objectives are then added by your HQ during the mission. One of the major flaws in the game is this very thing. You may think that you have completed an objective only to find that you have to backtrack to a previous location because you missed a secondary objective that was added during your mission. After which you may have completed the objective and not even realize it. This aspect of the game needs some improvement to make the game flow better and alleviate some frustration.

Aside from a few irritating things that are likely just a result of personal taste, it's a decent addition to the series.

Good game, some excellent additions and improvements

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: March 03, 2007
Author: Amazon User

The Ghost Recon franchise is prolific and evolving. 2 is a big change over 1 from FPS into FPS/TPS - 3rd person over-the-shoulder. More games should employ the FPS/TPS choice (Elder Scrolls does). Commands are new, interface new, weapons new. The gun with the TV screen is cool. Lone Wolf missions new. Voice acting new. There are some fierce massive firefights in this one over previous Ghost Recon games. The spirit is the same - squad-based military shooter. Great game.

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