GRAW 2 Review

GRAW2 has decided upon it's target audience, so if you are not a fan of the original's brutal difficulty and story, you're not welcome to this party

Posted by Alex V on April 25, 2009 - 4:50pm EST

Oftentimes, you will also get some random squad of military to help you. In some missions you’ll also get a portable supply jeep and even a tank. The problem is, you are given quite a lot to control at that point. You have 3 members of your Ghost team, a tank, and an army group – who all need to be controlled manually by issuing orders. Moving along a street simply becomes a chore at this point, forgetting for a second that there are enemies to fight at the end of it. In some situations you’ll also get an airstrike or a tactical bomb available, which will very inconveniently appear in the list together with your squad and anything else you are controlling. Often times, in the heat of battle, I scrolled though the selection with my mouse and selected the airstrike instead of my ghost member, resulting in a massive panic and retreat orders as the area we were using for cover was turned into ashes. There’s no way to cancel orders for things like that, and you only get a limited number of uses, so it’s pretty disappointing to waste it by accident.

And so we are back to the AI discussion. And unfortunately, the AI in GRAW2 has become worse than the original. The enemy AI is pretty much unchanged, they will still pull off superhuman shots from miles away even if you expose a pixel of your body. What’s changed is the friendly AI. It seems the developers decided that it was not to the player’s advantage to have his Ghost squad take out the enemies with little involvement from the player. So, your Ghost team is now really poor at shooting, and will happily waste 3 clips of ammo into a brick wall behind which an enemy is hidden. Gone are the situations where, at difficult levels, I would send my squad ahead to at least have a chance at them picking off the far-away enemies with their superhuman precision. In GRAW2, most of the game was spent micro-managing my Ghosts not to die because they can’t hit an enemy crouched around the corner from blank point range. I had to mostly use them to watch my back as I tried to handle things on my own. That didn’t stop them from their other problem (as mentioned earlier), and that’s wasting ammo. I’ve had my team member waste an RPG rocket in a single enemy standing in the distance, for no reason whatsoever. How dearly I missed having that RPG rocket 5 minutes later when we were tasked with shutting down a helicopter.

With enemy AI unchanged, the game is as brutally difficult as the original. In fact, don’t let the mission drop point selection throw you off – the game is more linear than the original, which makes for some endlessly frustrating sections of gameplay, with no alternate routs available. The game is also very helicopter crazy, you will encounter probably 4 or 5 as mini-bosses and they take forever to kill with conventional weapons. Thankfully, you will encounter almost no enemy tanks compared to the first game.