In past reviews I have ranted about the games that are developed
for multiple consoles as I don't believe this allows for customization of the
game to play to the strengths of each system. Now with Ghost Recon 2 out for
both the Playstation 2 and Xbox I can see that this approach doesn't necessarily
work the way I had hoped. While the two games share the same name and same
general concept, they are indeed different games and that's too bad for PS2
owners as they have certainly gotten the worse of the two. Too bad for me also
because I'm reviewing the PS2 version instead of the much superior Xbox game. Oh
well, let go on and find out why you should avoid this mess...
The story behind the PS2 version of Ghost Recon 2 is actually pretty
interesting. An American surveillance ship has been destroyed off the coast of
Japan. The U.S. Chief of Staff has a pretty good idea that North Korea is behind
the act in an attempt to create chaos so they can overtake South Korea.
(Interesting aside here, South Korea has banned the sell of this game.) The
President gives the orders for the elite and highly trained “Ghosts” to go into
North Korea and stop their leader, Major-General Paik, from causing any more
havoc and disrupt their nuclear program. Your missions will range from rescuing
POWs, taking out high ranking officials, and various ambushes on conveys.
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| Mass confusion reigns thanks to the lame AI. |
I will say this all sounds like a lot fun, but it's really not. If you are
expecting something along the line of a sophisticated and technical military
simulator you will be greatly disappointed. In GR2 you are the leader over a
single squad containing 4 soldiers that, in theory, will carry out some fairly
simple commands from you. These commands are things like regroup, scout, stay,
attack (suppress), and throw some grenades. The problem is that you can usually
do just as well with or without these guys and sometimes they cause you more
trouble than they do the bad guys. For example, there are going to be several
times where you will need to backtrack and find members of your team because
they were unable to figure out how to get around a certain obstacle. Come on
guys, team AI like that is just plain embarrassing! I'm supposed to be leading
an elite fighting team and I look behind me to see one of my teammates unable to
walk around a corner!
Speaking of AI, as bad as your teammates are about walking that is a good as
the enemy is at seeing you. The enemy has X-Ray like vision and will spot and
shoot you no matter how well you believe you are hidden not to mention that
these dudes are incredible shots. The enemy will routinely hit you from hundreds
of yards away. Actually I saw one of my teammates get shot from a sniper that
was about 100 yards away. That in itself may not sound too impressive but when
you consider that he was hiding behind a wall at the time it does make the feat
more improbable! Very impressive and much more than the Ghosts can do. This also
leads to the collision detection of GR2. The North Koreans must have super
bullets because their shots will go through just about anything!
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