Each of Tom Clancy’s games has had their own style of play in the past. Splinter Cell is the sneak and stealth game, Rainbow Six was the operative team game that evolved into a game where you controlled one person out of a team and Ghost Recon seems to be headed in the same direction, a clone of Rainbow Six. In the latest release of Ghost Recon, a television documentary follows your ghost squad exploits through the game and tells the story of how the Ghosts infiltrated the country of North Korea after each mission. The new game is different in many aspects, from getting a face lift as well as quite a few gameplay changes. Are they for the better? Unfortunately not.

No longer do you get to switch between teams or even other players. You are now stuck to play one character in your squad and when that character dies, your mission is failed and your game is over. It does keep you on your toes, tense and taught, but it becomes more then frustrating when a stray bullet takes you down. The days where you could still make it through the mission if your controlling character was to fall injured are apparently gone, as has being able to control a second team and set up ambushes and assaults. Your only choices now are to control the few soldiers with you to cover and flank or command them to attack certain targets or use certain objects. There is no setting of waypoints on the map anymore, the squad can only move as far as you can see to tell them, and that’s not far at all. You do have some fancy movements that allow you to roll while you are on the ground in prone position as well as the ability to pop your head around corners to look for imminent danger.

Also gone are the imaginative missions and replaced with repetitive and boring stand and defend missions. Where the first Ghost Recon had maybe two of them, they now make up about a third of the fifteen missions found in Ghost Recon 2, the rest are mind numbingly linear, move from point A to point B and blow something up. Although the game play wasn’t the only thing to get a make over, the graphics of the new game did as well, but thankfully, they were for the better. If you weren’t a great fan of the original first person view, an over the shoulder, not quite true third person, perspective is now used instead and for many, the view is actually a welcome change within the many that were made. The graphics themselves are crisp and clear as well as they should be on the Xbox and a welcome update to the blurred, awful graphics found on the Playstation 2 version.

Among the new additions, there is a nifty feature that adds a camera to your gun. This allows you to hold you gun over your head, over barricades and obstacles to shoot at your opponents while remaining in cover. The enemy and ally AI seem to be about the same though, being both game controlled sides of characters are dumb as posts. Being shot and killed from behind while your team mate sits and watches the assailant approach is not an uncommon thing, nor is shooting an enemy that is shooting at you and watching him get down on the ground an turn around to face the opposite direction for whatever reason. The environments you traverse throughout the game are diverse enough, even if the missions aren’t and day and night missions are both to be found. There are also a few missions where you will be alone, without your squad and these will be the mission where you will be equipped with the gun camera. Why it wasn’t included in all missions, I don’t know, but it would have been more fun if it had.

The multiplayer aspect of the game that is played through Xbox Live is actually pretty substantial and includes seven different types of coop game play, enough to keep you busy for a long time after the single player campaign is over. Overall it seems that the Ghost recon franchise is drifting towards the tried and true style of Rainbow Six when they already had a successful method of game play working for them. If I wanted to play a Rainbow Six style game, I would play Rainbow Six. I and many other fans of Tom Clancy games enjoyed the uniqueness of Ghost Recon and the way it was previously and if they could revert to the game style of having controllable teams and set up plans of attack, while still having the new additions in graphics and features, it would make for a lot of happy gamers.