Behind the “Tortilla Curtain”…
The support I was talking about earlier comes in the form of the MULE battlefield drone (instead of those strategically placed ‘ammo ATMs’ from the first game) that can follow you, or you can really have some fun and drive it yourself. The new support views for the Cypher UAV, the MULE, or any other assistance you access from the Cross-Com communications system all have this neat black-and-white TV camera look that can be used to directly control the UAV’s flight path, or what your armor support whales away on. This was the part that I liked the most. I no longer have to look at a little tiny window in the top left corner of my HUD, I now have a fullscreen view.
You also get a neat new Littlebird (the Hughes helo) to strafe ground targets with, along with a Stryker armored vehicle, and even some assistance from the US Air Force in the form of some devastating and well-timed airstrikes. The combat gets pretty intense, too, with some levels offering a little bit of surprise. For instance, there’s one level in which you’re stripped of all your neat targeting gear and have to pick your way through a dilapidated village to your extraction near a refinery with just your Mk 1 Mod 0 Eyeball and a rifle. Another one was a very tense confrontation in a dark cemetery all by your lonesome with about twenty or so bad guys running between the graves like drunk college kids.
The new night vision system is also a plus, in that it’s actually true night vision instead of the thermal detection goggles in the first game. If the sun begins to rise and you still have them on, you’ll be blinded, so there’s that hour of dawn or twilight that you can’t use the goggles and the targets are still partially obscured by the lack of light…just like in real life. One really weird thing about the night vision goggles…your frames per second actually go up when you turn them on.
Your weapons inventory has also got some new additions, including the return of satchel charges, which are great if you don’t want to lug around an anti-tank rocket launcher at the expense of a rifle and you have bad luck to run across the odd armored personnel carrier. Your choices for a secondary weapon include some new items like submachine guns and shotguns instead of the default Beretta 9mm pistol you were stuck with in the first GRAW. All in all, the new items are welcome and increase the level of mayhem you get to deal out.
Better Than Border Visits In College…And Safer
The real strength of GRAW 2 is the multiplayer, at least from a replayability standpoint. Having visited a few of the public rooms as a spectator (given my satellite broadband speed), I can tell you that public multiplayer is still a waste of time. The real fun is still the campaign in cooperative mode with friends. Like Terrorist Hunt inRainbow Six: Vegas, playing around with the game
Since you’re on Xbox Live, the connection is virtually lag-free and there’s a wealth of multiplayer maps to choose from. The graphics are about the same as the original, Ubisoft choosing (wisely, I think) not to mess with a winning formula.
With ranked matches, non-ranked matches and now clan matches to play, there’s a little more meat to this release as Ubisoft figured out really quick that people were buying GRAW for multiplayer gaming. The co-op campaign that you and your friends get to play takes place in Panama and is peripherally related to the single-player campaign. The graphics are slightly poorer in multiplayer, but no one seems to mind.
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