Reviewer System Specs -
Abit KG7-Raid, AMD Athlon XP 1500+ (1.33 ghz), Visiontek Xtasy 5864 - 64 MB GeForce 2 Ti, 768 MB PC2100 DDR, Soundblaster Live Audigy.

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Released today, Red Storm's newest tactical first person shooter is sure to become a fan favorite. Make no mistake, Ghost Recon follows the mold RSE pioneered with Rainbow Six and Rogue Spear. While not officially "Rainbow Six 3", Ghost Recon is essentially the next incarnation of the series, unless of course RSE wants to prove me wrong by releasing R6:3 sometime soon. The major difference between Ghost Recon and the previous tactical shooters released by RSE is the immense outdoor environments present in Ghost Recon.

First things first: RTFM

Ubi Soft provided the Ghost Recon Retreat a paper copy of the manual that will ship with the game. The document was nearly sixty pages of 8 ½ x 11 paper. That is a lot of information for it to be a printed manual for a game, considering many games ship with very sparse, if any printed documentation at all.

I found the manual to be well written and helpful in explaining many parts of the game. Some jargon slipped in, such as the use of the word "pips" to describe the waypoint and north indicators on the threat indicator. Many people may not know what a "pip" is and they may find this slightly confusing. All in all, the manual was very helpful in determining in game functions, especially for the new map and planning interface that takes place during the game.

One thing I found interesting, was that after reading the manual I came away with the impression that the game is designed for you, the player, to do most of the primary functions, and complete most of the objectives, unlike Rogue Spear where it was common to send a team off on its own to accomplish many facets of the mission at hand.

Initial Game play Impressions

After installing Ghost Recon, a fairly lengthy task for those of you with older PCs and slower hard drives considering that the install is just less than 1GB of data, I loaded up the training section to get an initial taste of in game control.

Sticking with the default keymap, I quickly learned that control-wise, Ghost Recon is very similar to Rogue Spear. The training map lets you practice everything from the new sniper rifle reticule, to the standard assault rifle, to practicing the command map interface for controlling your teammates.

One of the first and most striking new features was the introduction of the "smooth zoom" allowing me to go from min to max zoom and back using my middle mouse wheel. This feature would prove to be one of the better control enhancements from Rogue Spear.

After fiddling around in the training mission for about 10 minutes, I loaded up the campaign.

In standard RSE form, I was presented with a briefing screen documenting the mission objectives. From the briefing screen you are quickly moved to the soldier selection screen. Unlike R6 and RS, you can only have 6 operatives for a mission in Ghost Recon, with no more than 3 on one squad. The team selection screen allows for the 6 operatives to be spread out among an Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie squad. For those of you scoring at home, that allows for squads of 3x3, 2x2x2, 1x2x3, or any other combination that has 3 or fewer per squad and uses no more than 6 operatives, total.

The operatives themselves are broken down into specialty classes, and for the initial mission you can chose from, 6 rifleman, 2 support specialists (think SAW laden bearers of death and destruction), 2 snipers and 2 demolitions experts. After picking up 3 rifleman, I clicked the begin mission button, eagerly anticipating the game behind the gorgeous screenshots that have been coming from RSE and Ubi Soft for months now.

RSE sure chose a wonderful first mission to set the tone for the new eye candy that is present in GhostRecon. When I loaded into the mission I sat there for a second saying WOW once I saw the trees. The implementation of trees and shrubbery (Gah! Is this a gardening review?) is quite simply the best I have ever seen in any game. As I sat there for the initial few seconds admiring the new world, I noticed that the trees seemed impressively alive. At first I couldn't figure it out and then it struck me, they were swaying in the wind. Do swaying trees make for good game play? Not really, but it damn sure looks cool.

Meat and potatoes

The game itself consists of 15 missions, varying in locale from forests, to a murky swamp, to a healthy dose of urban combat environments. As mentioned before, graphics have taken a tremendous step up from Rogue Spear. The character models are superb, if you have the PC to run at high resolutions that is. The single player campaign is difficult to say the least. I couldn't get past level 5 without enacting a cheat code. This may seem daunting; however the fans of this series that love the "tactical" part of the tactical shooter genre will quickly fall in love with the challenging missions.

The AI, both enemy and friendly is much better than in previous games from RSE. Try to hide on a ledge using you "elite" sniper skills, and be prepared to be met with either a hand tossed or weapon propelled grenade round. The enemy AI will fire in the general direction they are taking fire from, its rather eerie, shooting at one tango and seeing tracers, yes that's right tracers, go zipping over your head from a direction you weren't expecting to see enemy fire from.

This is where the threat indicator comes in, alerting you to the location of enemies. The best way to explain the threat indicator is to simply show you a picture of it. The game play changes dramatically in multiplayer when you disable the TI. Some may hate it, but after playing without it I can say the game is nearly impossible. More realistic? Yes, but very frustrating.

The enemy AI will make use of cover, as well as covering fire, as they to flank you and your squad members. I can't tell you the surprise I felt when I was perched on a ledge sniping and suddenly got shot from close range from behind. Almost always, upon taking fire, instead of standing there in an "alerted" state as they did in RS, the enemy troops will seek cover, or go prone and fire in your direction.

The enemy AI still has an innate long range marksmanship quality, however; at least they usually miss on their first and second shots now. For the most part I found the enemy AI's marksmanship to be a tad too good in my opinion, some would argue I need to avoid getting shot better, but its no longer down right frustrating as it was in RS. You will not see any 75m snapshot headshots from the enemy anymore. This is a very good thing.

Your teammates' AI is also improved. On only a few occasions did I have difficulty exiting tight quarters. This is in a way understandable as for the most part we are not supposed to be operating in close quarters, however there are a few buildings on most maps that need cleared. All in all the movement and following models for the AI backup is greatly improved from RS.

The in-game planning interface, in combination with your teammates AI, is a tremendous change from the R6/RS planning interface. I will say that it does work, and you can definitely use it with great success; however I am inclined to think that I enjoyed the planning stage in RS better. This is not a negative point for Ghost Recon, it is just something that is different. The pre-action stage planning in R6/RS suits my playing style much better than the in-game, think on your feet, use the other teams primarily as support instead of having them complete mission objectives, style of play that the new planning interface dictates. Supposedly, this in-game planning interface represents the future implementation of the US Military's Land Warrior system. If so, I think it may be a fairly good implementation of it from what the public knows about the system.

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