Ghost Recon is Red Storm Entertainment's (UBI software) latest in their Tom Clancy tactical shooter genre of games. In the past Tom Clancy has produced some great titles such as the Rainbow Six and Rogue Spear series of games which was a huge success for fans of the genre. Ghost Recon is a similar title to that of Rogue Spear and Rainbow six with a bit of Operation Flashpoint and Delta Force to finish it all off.

Ghost Recon is set in the year 2008 and involves a rebellion in the Georgian republic which escalates into an international conflict between Russia and the US/UN alliance because the Russians are trying to start a communist regime all over again. You are part of an elite fighting force sent in to different locations across Russia to complete various missions. You are equipped with the most advanced battle field technology to date and have at your disposal a team of various specialists which are trained in different areas of modern day warfare. As far as the political side goes you don't really need to worry about that after all it's all made up. All you need to do is take yourself and your team into a mission, blow a few things up and kill allot of enemy's and then get out alive. Of course you get the odd person who insists on following the make believe war and Red Storm Entertainment have accounted for that and introduced a briefing system before each mission informing you of the different changes and current events that are taking place.

As soon as you start up the game you get a nice little intro which like most of Tom Clancy's Intro's contains actual footage from the game so you can get an idea of what the graphics should look like before you go and play it with your shitty graphics card =). The menu system is similar to most games these days, a very simply interface to use with all the bits and pieces you would normally see. The menu also has a nice splash screen image rotation feature so you're not stuck with the same boring image all the time.

Like most games of this nature you're given the option of taking part in a training exercise to get to grips with the basic controls and features of the game. Now this is where the fun starts because you actually get to see a bit, just a tiny little weenie bit of the lag running in single player mode! But we will get more in to that later in the review. Now the training missions are great for experiencing different aspects of the game and learning how to use what weapon for what situation so your not completely dumb founded and in simply terms "Fu*ked" when you stumble across a tank ready to unload in your direction. Thankfully Red Storm took some tips from the likes of Half-life and Tribes 2 to add a friendly female voice to the training missions to help you along. On completing the training missions you will then obviously want to jump right into the game and see some action and that is exactly what you are going to get!

Of course first you have to go through the briefing as mentioned earlier and the kit selection. This time round Tom Clancy has redone the system to make it very different from the interfaces which were used in Rainbow Six and Rogue Spear. It's now much easier and quicker to use because you don't have to go through planning before you enter the game. Once you have picked out your six team members you can head right into the game and begin with the mission phase. It's at this point which you become aware of what I was talking about earlier, because of the vast open areas, high textures and incomparability issues with some leading hardware manufacturers the game doesn't run very well at all. In fact it runs about as fast as Counter-Strike playing on a 133 MHz machine. Now I am not saying this will be the case for everyone but there has already been much dispute in the support forums covering the subject of performance issues even on the highest end of machines. The issues have brought outrage to many unhappy customers who are demanding Red Storm do something about it immediately with the release of a patch. Unfortunately this game really does require a monster of a machine with a power consumption that could only be acquired from your city's main power supply and for what? Yes the game looks good but so does AVP 2 and that runs fine!

Now I am not saying that Ghost Recon is a bad game its actually a good game one of the best I've played in ages, Red Storm have done a great job with the general game play of this title its extremely atmospheric, you feel like you are right in there with the action and the graphics are really top notch. The level design is really outstanding nothing I have seen before in a game of this nature and the vast open spaces of woodland can at times be breath taking. Some of the cool features that Red Storm has incorporated into their level design are swaying trees and realistic terrain with shrubs and bushes to hide behind. The terrain is very important in this game because it really seems to affect the way you play the game. Because Red Storm has done such a great job on the AI you can actually use the terrain to take cover and become invisible to the enemy helping you to move around more stealthily. A shot taking out one of a group of enemy soldiers will result in them randomly firing in the direction of where the shot sounded from. Unfortunately this can become quite disorientating for the player and before you know it one of those random bullets has found a nice new home inside your head. Apart from that I really couldn't give you an exact idea of how good the AI is because most if not all of the missions take place in wide open areas and the enemy is often just a dot in the distance, this of course isn't helped by the engines rather heavy fogging effects. Those of you who have played games such as Operation Flashpoint will realize when I say most of the time you're running around big huge maps trying to find something to kill. However the command interface gives you an idea of where your objectives are but not where you might run into patrols. You often find yourself coming under fire from no apparent source, and then you see the small dots in the distance over wise known as the enemy wasting a huge amount of ammunition in your direction. Unlucky for you by now most of your team has been wiped out and your there hiding behind a small rock hoping for some miracle. Unfortunately Red Storm hasn't taken into account that unlike you the computer generated enemy doesn't have to worry about the fogging effects.

I mentioned earlier about the planning phase of the game, normally in a game such as Rogue Spear you would have to plan your mission before you went into the game. But what if you wanted to change your plan once in game, you would normally have to abort the mission, redo the plan and restart the game again. Thankfully Red Storm came up with the idea of being able plan your mission while in game so they added a cool feature which simulates the latest in military hardware including the OICW combat systems and the Land Warrior command and control system. With this on-the-fly mission planning interface you now have the ability to constantly give orders to the available squads. This has proven to be quite a good feature; in the event of being pinned down by enemy fire you can order the other squads to pay a little visit through the back entrance, should we say!

And lets not forget that Ghost Recon also comes with multiplayer support for up to 36 people to play online via Internet (TCP/IP) or LAN (Local Area Network) in maps as big as 400m x 400m. As well as being able to play all of the 15 single player maps there are also 6 dedicated multiplayer maps available. Multiplayer can at times be quite fun if you find a good server to play on, if you play on UBI's multiplayer service you will find it very hard to find a decent server and there are rarely any dedicated servers to be seen so you can expect a lot of lag. But lets be honest now, in most if not all of the Tom Clancy's titles multiplayer has always been a very laggy business and its not very often that you come out of a multiplayer game thinking "wow I want to go in and try that for a second time". Red Storm really need to get together with other games manufacturers to rethink how they are going to improve their net code for future multiplayer games.

I would have to say that this game is definitely not for the hard core gamer who is really into Quake 3 style shooters. This game takes a lot of patience at times and thinking and it's simply not a case of going in there and blasting the shit out of everything in site. Overall this game is very well made and at times very enjoyable to play if you like this kind of thing! The performance issues are a big problem but it is more then likely you will not encounter the same problems as other people have. My advice to you is to check out the online documentation for known incompatibility issues and of course try out the demo before you spend 50$ on a game you may not want.

FINAL SCORE: 80%