GRAW2 Single Player Review

I started playing Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2's single player campaign on Friday afternoon. Sunday I finished the campaign on the "guarded Risk" difficulty setting. That was fast. I checked LiveEye and it said I had played for 12 hours, but 2 hours of that was me downloading the exclusive multiplayer map. So, that means I beat the single player campaign in 10 hours. I had fun playing it but I was not expecting it to be so short. I'm glad that I only rented it. I'm going to check out the multiplayer tonight and hopefully I'll get a change to check out the co-op options later this week, but if they are minimal as the single player I'm going to be pretty disappointed .

Like I mentioned after playing the demo, the game is like a slightly enhanced version of GRAW. The enhancements are nice, but nothing that makes the game really stand out. The new cross-com option to be able to see through your team mates cameras full screen and issue controls from that screen is nice. However, I found myself only using it when I could not get them into the position I wanted any other way. The graphics do look better in GRAW2, but there is just not enough new single player content. The story picks up right where GRAW left off and takes place mostly in Mexico again. So, while the graphics do look better you're still mostly looking at desert and rundown Mexican cities. Other than the length of the game the only other issue I had with it was that it is hard to tell exactly when a mission starts/ends sometimes. I do like that the game flows from one mission to the next, but when I needed to take a break I never knew if I was going to have to redo part of the game I had just played or not. I never did figure it out, but since it was so short it did not really matter that much. If it had been a longer game it would have been a bigger annoyance. I think GRAW2 would have been much better as an expansion to GRAW than as a stand alone game. If you are not going to play any GRAW2 multiplayer then this one is a rental for sure.