GRAW (Xbox) Thoughts

- General comments on the game -
A late release for this generation (March 9th, 06), surely one of the very last notable games for the Xbox. There are 2 versions of Advanced Warfighter: A slick tactical 3rd person shooter in the vein of Ghost Recon 2 released for next gen consoles, and a glaringly lower-rent FPS in the vein of Ghost Recon 1 released for Xbox, PC and PS2.

I've seen people say stuff about this game over the years; stuff like "this is the REAL GRAW, this is the BEST Ghost Recon since 1, this is the only other TRUE Ghost Recon game etc." In fact this is essentially all anyone ever says about this game whenever they have anything to say about it in the first place. Some opinions are so off yet so strong and uncompromising that I question if they can be counted as an opinion anymore and not just something stupid someone decides to parrot based on a stance they arbitrarily took against 3rd person Ghost Recon games. First person good, third person bad. I like both styles personally.

This game exists in limbo between the pure free-roaming tacticalism of Ghost Recon 1 and the more linear cinematic designs of modern games. It's not great at either approach. It's neither a good old school tactical FPS nor a particularly good modern game. Therefore, I'd put it below any Ghost Recon title released before 2008. The AI behavior in particular seems to be an afterthought and below the level you'd need for a meaningfully tactical single-player shooter, being more in line with generic action shooter AI.

- Comments on playing the multiplayer-
A 6th gen FPS with usable hit registration, no aim assist (while still being playable), bullet direction indicators when enemies are firing, and tracer rounds to give the player further indication of where they're being shot from? Who would have imagined that such a multitude of thoughtful features could be swimming around in the mind of a 6th gen FPS developer?

Always having a sniper rifle as a secondary weapon was weird. I can't think of any other game that's like that, so it did present an extra wrinkle to the gameplay.

Some of the maps, such as Gravel Pit, were pretty bad from a design standpoint. Some of the maps have an "it's too damn dark" problem. The game does have a couple modes of night vision, but they were never enabled. They didn't look like an appealing way of playing the game anyway, but neither is not really being able to see. It doesn't help that the visor has a filter that's supposed give the look of a grainy video feed. Problem is you're putting a grainy video feed filter over the entire game as the visor is your default way of seeing. Eyeballs would have worked better in most cases.

It wasn't until deep into this session that I figured out how the jammer works. You pick it up and drop it somewhere, jamming the enemy HUD. This has the effect of the enemy no longer being able to tell friend from foe around the jammer since both sides look identical. Fortunately friendly fire wasn't on for much of this and the consequences of the jammer was just that sometimes two players were awkwardly shooting at each other in the belief that it was an enemy they were shooting at and that they were either missing badly somehow or being jobbed by latency spikes. I'm sure there's supposed to be some deep message about modern warfare and how you can have all this advanced tech, but it still means nothing without proper communication. It's an interesting mechanic that we neutered by turning friendly fire off. It just wasn't the right setting for friendly fire [on].

Sadly, we never got to the co-op modes. Maybe they don't support enough people unlike in Ghost Recon 2; I don't know. From my brief experience, the enemies are ridiculous aimboats that relentlessly sprint at you once you're detected. Could have been fun in a shared shitty experience sort of way though.

The Siege mode is awful. One team infinitely spawns and runs towards a capture point; the other team infinitely spawns on and camps the capture point. Mind-numbing and unfun for both sides. Evidently every multiplayer game of this era needs at least one abysmally tedious and inherently unbalanced mode. I was only on offense once during the first time playing the mode, so I didn't know what was going on, but it seemed to me that all it took was for the attacking team to clear one avenue of approach a single time, sprint to the point marked on their screen and they instantly win. Wow. Good thing they have virtually unlimited attempts during the match period to pull off this amazing feat of shooting guy and running to thing once. Good god, people were paid to design and approve these modes.

I liked the Last Team Standing mode the best. That's when the game felt the most like a tactical shooter. The Strike Command mode was alright, but I didn't use explosives at all. I'm not sure what explosives have to do with it other than, they do. I'm not going to pretend to fully understand the vision of that mode. We only played it twice.

The player icon on the map is way too hard to pick out. Sometimes I had to stare at the map for awhile to tell where my icon even was.

It sounds like I'm down on the game overall, but it's still fun. Once you figured out the movement limitations and when to listen for footsteps, it was fairly engaging and you could make some moves.