Given the original "Ghost Recon" is one of my favorite PC games, I was really interested in this "Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter" (GRAW from now on). I bought it some time ago and soon discovered it had some flaws that could ruin the gaming experience for me. I started playing the game two times and both times stopped only minutes after, annoyed by the terrible AI of your teammates and the lack of a save option among other things. The problem is since I first saw this game I had the feeling it could be interesting so, recently, I decided to give it another chance and once you assume it's a game far from perfect, and has some annoying things you have to put up with in order to enjoy it, GRAW becomes a pretty decent tactical military FPS.

The fact that you can give orders to just three soldiers and you only control the leader of the team, the fourth member of the squad, results in a game too simple compared to the original, offering a very limited set of tactical options. This is a design decision which may be a problem only for those who played the original or want more depth, but there are some things that are clearly badly implemented and/or make the game lose points, being the main one the terrible AI of your teammates.

I can't express how frustrating is watching your guys do incredibly stupid things that most of the times end with them dead, specially in a game with no save option, only checkpoints. The pity is they are quite competent some times and move in a realistic way, but there's an, at least, equal number of times they don't exactly act like the 'bad ass' special ops soldiers they are supposed to be, far from it, so you have to be constantly watching over them, expecting the worse so you have time to try to mend things, which isn't always possible.

Another bunch of things I didn't like: you can't save whenever you want; you can't pick up enemy weapons; the briefings don't give you enough information to decide which weapons to carry with you...

After reading all of the above, you could be thinking I really hated this game, but as I hinted briefly in the introduction GRAW ended being a pretty fun game for me once I stopped focusing on the things I disliked and started noticing the game had some features I really liked: the great graphics and good sound effects, the atmosphere, the missions, the weapons, the story... GRAW could have been a great game, but due to some big flaws and design decisions it ended up being an overall good game, bad at some points and great at others. I think it's a game worth playing and don't regret buying it.

PS: I've started playing GRAW 2 and some of the things I didn't like were fixed for this one, like picking enemy weapons, saving the game... It's too soon to say anything about the AI, I've just played the first mission, but if that was fixed too, it could become one of my favorite games.