First 50:
51. The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (PC)(FPS)
52. The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena (PC)(FPS)53. 9:05 (PC)(Text Adventure)54. Mercenary Kings (PC)(Run and Gun)55. Super Pinball: Behind the Mask (SNES)(Pinball)56. Pinocchio (SNES)(Platformer)57. Iron Brigade (PC)(Tower Defense/TPS)
58. Iron Brigade: Rise of the Martian Bear (PC)(Tower Defense/TPS)59. Anachronox (PC)(RPG)60. Banished (PC)(Strategy)61. Rune (PC)(Action)62. Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter (PC)(FPS)Well, that was easy.
I kid, I kid! A few months back, ExedExes had the joy of playing through Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter(GRAW) for the PC, which resulted in him and Exhuminator having quite a few talks on the subject. It came up again a few weeks ago, and I indicated I would be willing to give it a shot if I got the chance. Well, since it's never been on GOG and has been pulled from Steam, Exhum decided the best thing to do was to mail me a copy directly, along with all relevant patch info, set up a few ground rules, and have me try out the GRAW challenge. I've completed it, and it was at times a bloody and bumpy wild ride.
First, a little background info: GRAW is the result of the ever increasing Tom Clancy line of Tactical FPS. There are also a couple of different versions of the game, depending on the format you pick to play it on. GRAW on consoles is a third person shooter cakewalk filled with gumdrops, rainbows, and unicorns, where enemies die at your squad's feet from your sheer force of good will and you can save anywhere you want at any time, even right before a sniper's chocolate bullet smacks into your skull and sends you down to the peppermint pavement. GRAW on the PC is an entirely different matter. Instead of a TPS, it's an FPS. Instead of saving anywhere, it's checkpoint saves only, usually with a lot of walking and shooting and explosions between. There is still a squad, but most of its members consist of hyperactive five year olds who have no idea what words like 'warzone' mean. Oh, and it's low-carb, so no sugar. No sugar at all! That's because GRIN developed it, and if you haven't seen the GRIN logo, well...the sweets have done their damage.
As an experiment, I went online to look up what other folks thought. Well...I'll just post what I found here:
The biggest difference is the PC version is PSYCHOTICALLY DIFFICULT
One thing about this game is that it is very difficult. Even on easy it can be very tough.
This has to be one of the worst games ive ever played. Mainly because even on normal difficulty if you end up getting shot even just a couple of times your dead. Not to mention the fact that you cant save on your own and have to rely on check points instead(which obviously isnt helpful considering you lose 10-30 minutes everytime your dead)
Words like 'impossible' get bandied around a lot when describing the PC release of GRAW. This seems to come from several important factors: distant checkpoint saves, bad friendly AI, good enemy AI, and for some folks whining in places like GameFAQS, a lack of familiarity with tactical FPS gameplay. Hell, I got through it and got pretty lucky with the AI a lot of the time, and there were still many moments when I just had to stop and shake my head at what my squadmates were doing. Even during my triumphant final run to the ruins of the US embassy in Mexico City in the final level, where nearly everything went perfectly, one of my squadmembers took a brief intermission to go run off like a loon for a few seconds before I pulled him back in. He nearly bit it in the process but thankfully recovered in time. I know what you're thinking, "How bad could it be?" Well, let me tell you a few things I saw my friendlies do:
Walk into machinegun fire and then start rolling around on the ground uselessly while they're being pumped full of bullets.
Take the long way around a building and get killed by a sniper instead of moving five steps to the right like I ordered.
Absolutely refuse to move to a safe spot and instead continuously stand behind slim cover getting shot at while repeatedly shouting, "Negative!" to my order.
Switch to a fully-loaded weapon and shout, "Reloading!" every five seconds.
Forget they are carrying a bazooka and assault a tank with a pistol.
Walk into a machinegun emplacement. Like right in front of it. While the gunner is still alive and shooting at them.
Run up and stand next to an enemy APC right as a friendly tank shoots it, killing my squadmate in the process.
Pull out a bazooka and hold it like a rifle, refusing to switch to anything else even though only enemy infantry is attacking us.
The list goes on and on. I eventually figured out that the absolute best way to deal with them was to treat them like children, with constant guidance, easy to understand commands, and often leaving them in a play pen or some such area while I went ahead and took care of the real dirty work on my own. But despite all of these issues, they often also did their jobs surprisingly well. It helps that I tended to keep them on a tight leash. All of their movements were leapfrogged over each other, I was always sure to overlap lanes of fire, and when attacking an enemy, I often would do my best to pull them to my location so I could go on the defensive and surprise them with the whole squad. A couple of times I even used them or myself as a guinea pig to draw fire. The thing is, the enemy AI apparently would rather attack me than the other squad members, so I often had to run interference to set up my sniper for a shot. When it worked, it worked gloriously. When it failed...well, back to the drawing board.
As for the enemy AI, it's not that I think they are necessarily better, it's just that I think they are more limited in what they can do. More than once I saw an enemy sprint out and then basically lie down in the middle of a street with no cover. At that point I would oblige them with a bullet because they were just begging for it. Also, since they were gunning for me specifically, I definitely set them up for a fall more than once. And enemies also have a limited range, so I successfully took out my fair share of tanks and machine gunners by skirting the edge of that range and taking them out from afar. Recognizing their limitations helped me get through more than a couple of tough scrapes.
I also managed to simply avoid much of the enemy. The maps are pretty big in GRAW, and you absolutely do not have to fight everything. Often times I would take a long time at each objective to identify back alleys and narrow corridors where few enemies would hide and little resistance would be encountered. This worked surprisingly well, though I did occasionally have to work around snipers and the like. It also let me hit many of the enemy's defensive positions from unexpected angles, meaning I could easily take out dire threats from behind or the sides where they could not aim.
If I did screw up, it was back to a checkpoint though. That sucks, I'm not gonna lie. There's no way to make those easier, you just have to be willing to experiment at times and learn the best route from one checkpoint to the next. Occasionally these got pretty long and difficult to deal with, and there are quite a few places where I think the game would have sorely benefited from more of them. But every failure was an opportunity to learn too, and I managed to recover from all of my mistakes to obtain victory in the end. Oh, checkpoints can also get glitched. At one point I basically had to restart a level because my checkpoint would refuse to spawn in enemies properly that I had to kill. That was freaking annoying. Actually the whole game could get pretty buggy at times, ranging from messed up enemy spawns to trouble with the tactical map, to texture issues, to a whole mess of other stuff. Even fully patched, GRAW has some serious problems at times.
Here's the thing folks: I wouldn't recommend GRAW to most of you. I just wouldn't. It's not that it's a bad game, but I don't think many of you could hack it, truth be told. It requires a lot of patience, a slow and steady hand, and a willingness to learn from your failures, because you will fail a lot. I also recommend you have some previous knowledge of either tactical FPS design or squad tactics, so you have at least a basic grasp of concepts which are absolutely necessary to survive and make any headway. If you've never heard of terms like "slicing the pie," "interlocking fire," or even "stack-up," you probably shouldn't consider playing GRAW.
But for those of you who are interested in finding out if you've got the balls to beat GRAW, here are the rules: you play on PC, fully patched, Normal difficulty, no cheats. Good luck, and remember: no guts, no glory.
"
No plan survives contact with the enemy."
- Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, the Elder
