Product Reviews

If you like your first-person shooters to have a realistic edge, you'll like Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. This is another Tom Clancy game and it's the usual mix of political intrigue and covert operations, this time set in the year 2013. It displays realistic weaponry and damage, so a couple of shots will kill you or your enemy.

Just like with real warfare, you have a squad at your command to help you with missions. Ghost Recon will pleasantly surprise anyone who remembers the nightmarishly difficult squad planning that went into Rainbow Six. First, you can direct your squad from inside the main game. In the middle of a firefight, for example, you can call a squad member and direct them to flank your attacker. The commands are all accessed using your mouse's scroll wheel, so it's easy to give orders.

If you want to plan a more in-depth assault, there's the second form of command using the satellite map. This gives you an overhead view of the mission area and lets you direct your squad. It's possible to string together commands, so you can easily plan your

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squad's movement and their following attack pattern. As this is all done within the game, if anything changes or you decide to try a different tack, you can change your whole plan on the fly.

Planning is essential for success, as a bullet or grenade will end your game. Sneaking, ducking and diving to the ground in a shower of dust are all tactics that will become second nature.

At times, though, we found the game incredibly hard and spent a good deal of time getting shot by terrorists we hadn't noticed. Unless you're prepared to sneak around each and every corner, you're likely to suffer the same fate.

One of the best things about the game is the graphics. Advanced Warfighter made its debut on the Xbox 360, so it uses the latest technology and looks stunning. The war-ravaged cities where you spend a lot of time fighting look like they are from a real news report. Added to the fluid character animation, this is one of the most realistic-looking games we've played. There are some stunning uses of all this technology, too, such as in the first mission, where you start a few thousand feet over a city and are air-dropped into the danger zone. As you plummet towards the earth, the city comes into focus perfectly.

This breath-taking quality comes at a price, though. To play Advanced Warfighter at its best, you need a very powerful PC and a high-end graphics card; it was a little jerky at 1,280x1,024 on our dual-core PC with an Nvidia 7800 GTX graphics card.

This is a stunning-looking game and it is a lot of fun to play, but the high system requirements and obscene levels of difficulty will make it frustrating for a lot of people.