Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon for Xbox

Having been drawn well and truly into the tactical-shooter game fold, with Red Storm's excellent Rogue Spear and it's various expansion packs, and with the names "Red Storm", "Ubi Soft" and "Tom Clancy" all appearing on the box for Ghost Recon, I knew it was a game I was going to have to add to my collection.

At the time I got hold of Ghost Recon, I was still heavily playing Rogue Spear: Black Thorn, the final expansion for that game. Initially, I was rather surprised to find that Ghost Recon was a little slow to hook me, especially since the game basically features the same mission based team-strategy combat I had come to expect, this time set in Central Europe.

You see, where the earlier game Rogue Spear brought such realisms as "one shot kills" (even to the player) and realistic movement, items and locations to the world of first person shooters, Ghost Recon goes about a million steps further. A lot of fans of "Action Shooters", such as Quake and it's many clones, were frustrated with Rogue, because you cannot simply run around, gunning everything in sight to oblivion, while catching dozens of bullets to various parts of your body and only being put out by a reduction in "energy" until you could find the nearest power-up to run over and magically heal yourself. In fact, Tactical Shooters, such as RS and Ghost Recon bear about as much game-play similarity to Action Shooters as an Arnold Schwarzenegger action blockbuster movie does to an old classic like The Guns of Navarone.

Of course, I scoffed at my Quake-mad friends not being able to adapt to a less shallow form of game play and embraced Rogue Spear, so I was a bit embarrassed when the added realism (the million further steps I spoke of) in Ghost Recon made the game initially un-attractive to me.

Well.... Perhaps un-attractive is the wrong word. Ghost Recon looks absolutely stunning, with some of the most lusciously rendered exterior locations I have ever seen in a computer game. People honk on mightily about the Quake 3 engine, but that oft used scaffold simply pales in comparison to the magnificence on show in Ghost Recon. On maximum detail, the landscape, plant-life, and man-made structures mesh together wonderfully to create a truly immersive and natural-feeling locale for the game-play to take place. Enemy soldiers come in varieties of looks. No longer do we have to put up with dozens of guys looking exactly the same, giving the enemies a more personal feel and adding a while new element of horrific realism to the killing you will inevitibly perform. While you are gazing in wonder at the visuals, the incredible surround-sound hits you, which ranges from the ambient sound perfectling fitting the surroundings of your immediate location, to the extra-meaty sound of bullets pounding into living flesh.

Of course, my problem was that in addition to appearance, Ghost Recon shows me just how unrealistic, the previously amazing looking Rogue Spear, in fact is. What felt like cunningly stealthy tactics in the older game (creeping around corners, peeking around a wall and generally out-foxing the enemy), simply doesn't work in Ghost Recon because of the incredible AI of the enemy. As soon as you have given your location away or are spotted, the enemy is either shooting at you with quite startling accuracy, or hastily acting to outflank your team and turn the tables and quite often, before you know it you are a bloody mess, or dead, or more likely, both. Add this to the fact that Ghost Recon boasts some enormous locations, with sometimes literal minutes required of running from place to place, you are often taking fire from ant-like figures hundreds of metres into the distance and this time around the enemy is actually looking for you instead of sitting around like crash-test dummies waiting to be shot, so if you can see them, you are in just as much danger as they are.

As if all this wasn't enough to mean that my team was quickly the victim of a mass violent slaughter each and every time I attempted a mission, Ghost Recon has your enemy actually taking the battle to you, with vehicles zooming onto the scene, chock full of irate terrorists! All of this makes for an incredibly realistic gaming experience, but as I have said, it took me several days (and LAN sessions) of being frustratingly crap at playing the game, until I began to work out some of the amazingly detailed strategy and movement required to complete the various missions. Once I started to have some success, Ghost Recon, quickly supplanted the now primitive Rogue Spear as my game of choice.

Now, while the detail of the areas and the level of character AI is simply breath-taking, so much time and thought has gone into many other simple cosmetic areas of Ghost Recon. Headlights and tires may be shot out of vehicles and bullet holes in both metal and wood look more realistic than ever before. Weaponry similarly behaves in a realistic fashion, and as a fan of the "Sniper" type of soldier, I appreciated the refinement of that role - for example, once I had got over the highly annoying way the scope really obscures your vision from all but the area you are zoomed in on, I realised that (while frustrating) this was just another addition of what I imagine you could expect in the real world.

The only drawbacks I have found in Ghost Recon are the fact that you run out of levels to play far too quickly (although there are a fair amount) and more seriously, the mind-bogglingly simplified kit-selection section. In Ghost Recon, instead of being presented with a Rogue Spear style gear-selection screen, where you could Choose between all manner of wonderfully detailed (and described) primary, secondary and miscellaneous weapons, all with terrifically drawn images of the item in question, we get a quite horrendously cut down little box down the bottom left of the screen, where you flick through various pre made "kits", individually numbered. Gone are the excellent pictures of the weapons - here you just get some generic 2D cutout images of the general shape of the weapon. There is also quite a lack of variety in the weapons. You simply have a few different guns for each type of soldier.

Only the basic kit-selection prevents Ghost Recon from thrashing the previous Rogue Spear in all ways, so when you stop to consider that Rogue Spear has been a beacon for quality gaming for the past few years, you should start to understand just how special a game Ghost Recon actually is. Action gamers should probably steer clear, but the thinking, strategy shooter fan, should look this way for their very Mecca.


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My system is an Intel Pentium IV 1.9Ghz, on an Abit BD7, with 256 DDRAM and a Gforce 2 Ti. I write this here, because for some reason Epinions STILL has PIII and Gforce 1 and 600+ MHZ as the maximum items in their forms for automatic selection. Am I the only one who feels like the PC side of gaming is suffering from serious neglect here at Epinions? I would write many more reviews if new items would actually be added!