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Ghost Recon 2 
Release date: 2 Nov 2004
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Mygamer review
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Good God, Ubisoft!
After playing Ghost Recon 2 for a while, the thought occurred that it might be damaging my GameCube. Something this bad has to be tainting the hardware running it.
The original Ghost Recon for the PC was all about squad control, tactics, and often stealthy approaches (hence the word Ghost in the title?). The player could jump to any member of the team at any time, moving them into specific positions to best corner or flank the enemy. Snipers were priceless. Death came as quickly as one accurately placed bullet, for friend or foe. Skip ahead a few years and through the console-ization of the series (i.e., making it more of an action game than a thinking man’s battlefield sim), and Ubisoft has managed to forge the polar opposite of what the series originally sought to be. It’s hard to believe Tom Clancy would put his name on this generic tripe.
So where silence and stealth once reigned supreme, now the weapon selection is paltry and mostly noisy. Squad commands are boiled down completely from full control and an intuitive waypoint system to four point-and-click commands that the squad will execute approximately whenever they feel like it, or sometimes not at all. Switching characters is also gone. Giving ‘go to location’ orders via the reticule was handled a million times better in games like Freedom Fighters and the Rainbow Six and S.W.A.T. series. The squad A.I. is deficient—at best—both at path finding and knowing when to duck. It’s frustrating beyond belief to watch as your troops stand motionless and take round after round in the chest without thinking once to maybe, erm, CROUCH?!
One design choice that clearly skews this title to the more run-and-gun player is how relatively weak and stupid the enemies are. They take but a few bullets to kill, making spray-and-pray a consistently effective way of handling most frantic firefights. During the massive load times, the game offers you ‘tips’, like firing short bursts to improve accuracy. It doesn’t matter, though, especially since there is such little sense of realism affecting the recoil and weapon aiming dynamic. Also, whether you hit an enemy in the head or in the foot, he’s done. The game keeps track of headshots, but the zoom on most guns is so poor that scoring a headshot will be accidental more often than not.
As mentioned, the load times are pretty bad. You’re looking at a whole minute of loading for each level. Seems like the Commodore 64 days where you could set up a game to boot and go make lunch or take a nap. Or both. And what do you get when all that hardened loading’s done and dusted? You get annoyingly excessive character sound effects—stealth isn’t necessarily executed stealthily when your soldiers’ boots trudging through the grass and his pant legs rubbing together make more noise than dropping a stack of ceramic plates on concrete—and surprisingly mediocre graphics with more choppiness and slowdown than you can shake a stick at. There are a few shining elements, like the textures of some uniforms, and the occasional piece of the landscape, but these come at a heavy price. For one thing, they make everything else look that much worse. For another, instead of huge and open outdoor environments in which enemies could hide anywhere, the game is made to be very, very linear, to the point that you really only need look in front of you to find the next bad guy. If, amazingly, you can’t spot him, a generic and relatively useless radarscope has been incorporated in the corner of the screen. It shows you what direction the enemy is coming from, but everything starts to blend together, making only muzzle flashes the way to tell foliage from foe.
Many stages also have scripted ‘dramatic’ events, but they’re mostly pointless and even illogical at times. For example, early on you’re charged with taking over a Korean airbase on foot, in hopes of doing the least amount of damage possible, so that the U.S. military can utilize the base once it is occupied by friendly forces. In the mission briefing it is specifically mentioned that because of wanting the base intact, it can’t be bomb it or suffer a full-scale assault. Once the mission starts, though, you have to spend your time not only dodging lead from impossible-to-spot enemies, but you also run the risk at every turn of getting bombed by your own planes, who apparently decided it was a good idea to flatten the base—with you inside it. Whose side are they on, anyway? Though this is meant to be exciting and tense, it ends up being completely annoying and often makes no logical sense.
It’s possible, and often desirable, to peek left and right from behind cover to pop a few shots at the enemy. Trying the same tactic between standing and crouching postures, you’ll find that the animations are so jerky that the character is brought to a screeching halt—from moving and firing—to raise or lower his posture. Note: Another easy way to get killed. The characters generally don’t move very fast, either, regardless of stance, and the prone position (laying flat on your stomach) is painfully slow and unwieldy, especially if you get snagged on a rock or a bush, or some other level boundary type of object. Note: Yet another great way to get killed!
The excising of multiplayer—online or otherwise—brings the game down even further, making it the worst of those available. Apparently the PC version of Ghost Recon 2 was recently cancelled, perhaps in reaction to the frigid reception of the other iterations by both critics and consumers? Just a theory.
As a game of tactics, it fails completely. As an action game, it doesn’t deliver any thrills or sense of style. Ghost Recon 2 simply fails at everything. The original Ghost Recon was so great when it first arrived on the PC scene. Ubisoft urgently need to go back to the gaming drawing board and figure out what they did right the first time, and make it better. I’m here to help.
Review by Mark Buckingham on 3 May 2005
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