The Xbox 360 version of the game hit shelves over two months ago, and was an instant hit with both critics (scoring a 9/10 from us) and consumers, quickly hitting the top of the sales charts. Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter on the PC takes a totally different approach to its console brethren. While the Xbox 360 version of the game was an action packed, third person experience, the PC game is first person and very heavy on strategy, not unlike the original Ghost Recon back in 2001. This may please the die-hard strategy fans, but it makes the game a lot less accessible, and gives it a fearsome level of difficulty and a steeper learning curve. Normally, this would be quite acceptable, but this version of Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter has a number of other problems that makes it quite inferior to its console brother.
Pimp My Ride: Mexico City
The plot of the game is fairly much in line with the other versions of the game. As Scott Mitchell, it is your job to command the Ghost unit. For this mission, the Ghosts have been handed the job of guarding a summit between the United States, Canada and Mexico. The proverbial hits the fan when a band of Mexican rebels hit the embassy where the talks are taking place, killing the Canadian prime minister, and causing the leaders of the other two countries to go missing. The Ghosts get the task of cleaning shop through the dense environments of Mexico City, from the rich urban centre, to the outlying shantytowns.
The layout of the city is quite different from the other versions of Advanced Warfighter. The PC version of the game seems substantially larger, the levels are laid out in a completely different manner and structured quite differently. You’ll still get to take helicopter rides through the city, which basically serve as an opportunity to demonstrate just how large and detailed the recreation of Mexico’s capital is. There’s a lot more detail in the construction of the buildings, giving enemies (and the Ghosts) a lot more hiding and cover opportunities. This additional cover almost completely changes the game – where the Xbox 360 game was somewhat forgiving of breaking from a slow pace, the PC game is designed with slow, systematic and strategic play in mind. Hardcore strategy fans will love this, but fans of the more recent Tom Clancy efforts will be frustrated quite quickly.
The game is almost fiendish in its difficulty. If you do not approach each mission with the utmost care and plan all of your moves using the games admittedly cool navigational and order systems, you’re going to be dead in an instant. Advanced Warfighter PC uses an order system much like the recent strategy title SWAT4, where orders can be given on the fly from a series of pop-up menus, or you can use the satellite map to plan an approach in advance. It’s a bit of a change from the 360 version, where your teammates would follow you, and follow basic orders, albeit poorly. A checkpoint save system is used for progression, which can lead to a bit of trial and error gameplay on the behalf of the player; again, good for strategists, bad for Rambos. The enemy AI is heavily scripted, which adds a little bit of leeway; if they were smart, reactive AI, the game would be almost impossible.
The Ghosts aren't big fans of outdoor eating
There’s also a good level of control over your main character in Advanced Warfigher. You can peer around corners, go prone and use a variety of different view modes. The PC version of the game even adds a few moves of its own, such as being able to run and dive into a prone stance. The first person viewpoint, along with mouse control does make aiming a heck of a lot easier than the already-good Xbox 360 game, but there’s a certain degree of lag in relation to the game’s controls. We’re not sure if this is attributable to the game’s considerable hardware requirements, or general bugginess, but the game would constantly lock down our controls – keep running long after we took our fingers off the keys, or continue firing after letting go of the button. It’s these little bugs that make the experience far more frustrating than it needs to be. The bugginess extends into the game’s multiplayer modes, as the game’s browser is essentially broken, and you have to perform little tricks on the interface to proceed in certain instances. The game also lacks dedicated server software, so expect an extra degree of lag. Advanced Warfigher has only two multiplayer modes; co-operative play through the game’s main missions, and a team-based capture and hold game. It’s a little disappointing considering the match depth of some of Ubisoft’s other strategy titles.
Strategy fans may already be drooling over the thought of playing Advanced Warfighter on their PC, but prepare to be disappointed. This game has the steepest hardware requirements of any game currently available on the market. Our review machine is an Athlon 3200 with 1.5GB of RAM and an ATI Radeon X800 Pro (with 256MB RAM), a machine that ran Oblivion on high detail without a hitch – and Advanced Warfighter reduced us to playing on medium in a low resolution. The game recommends a minimum of a 2Ghz processor or equivalent, 512MB of RAM and a 128MB video card , which is far beyond many other recently released games – and we can’t even begin to imagine how the game runs on that sort of specification. If money is no object, and you can afford to keep up with the latest PC market trends, Advanced Warfighter is a beautiful game, and can look even more beautiful with the right hardware. It’s the first game on the market to support the Aegis PhysX line of physics cards – while we don’t have this sort of hardware on hand, we’ve seen a bunch of promotional material, and it does make quite a bit of difference, but not enough to justify the price at this point in time.
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We’ve already mentioned how much extra detail and size has been packed into the city for the PC version of the game, but a lot of this extra detail also carries over to the character models. They’re packed full of detail, with folds in clothes, little bits of wear and tear on their armour, and some pretty cool self-shadowing effects. The animation is solid and quite realistic, but still has a bit of that floppiness and unnatural moon walking that affects many games. The game’s sound is sensational, with realistic and different sounding weapons, enemies cursing at each other in Spanish, and high energy, dynamic music that kicks in when the action intensifies. It’s good for giving your speaker set-up a bit of exercise, especially if you’ve got a surround sound set-up for your PC.
Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter for the PC is certainly not for everyone. It’s nowhere near as accessible as its next generation console brother, the hardware requirements are ridiculous, and there are a lot of bugs to be ironed out. That said, if you’ve just bought a new PC and need something to test it out, or you’ve been waiting for Ubisoft to release a strategy heavy shooter like the Rainbow Sixes and Ghost Recons of old, then you might want to take a look. A demo of the game is available, so it’s advisable to try before you buy.
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