Ghost Recon 2: Summit Strike review

As any of you who've read my Ghost Recon 2 diary will know, I've found Ubisoft's military shooter sequel to be the most fun Xbox Live game I've played. Sure Halo 2 has its moments, but there's nothing like a night time mission with friends, surrounded by able North Korean AI and with the radar switched off. It's tense and exhilarating and there's little like it on the platform.

So a new game before the proper Advanced Warfighter sequel is most welcome. Summit Strike takes the Ghost Recon 2 into a new campaign and adds plenty of new multiplayer action. The gameplay remains largely the same, but if it isn't broke, don't fix it. The action has moved from North Korea in the last GR2 game into the republic of Kazakhstan.

Kazakhstan-ago-go

The plot follows the assassination of the Kazakh President by a Pakistani warlord. The player joins the Ghosts on the UN mission to track down the warlord and his army in Kazakhstan.

It's a well chosen location for this budget semi-sequel. The variety of landscapes in this vast nation has allowed Ubisoft to feature a great variety of locations in the game. The campaign begins in the snowy mountains with the Ghosts attacking enemy SAM sites in a blizzard. It also neatly demos the many new weather effects featured here in Summit Strike.

Locations vary from lush grassy plains, to very impressive urban city-scapes - a foretaste of those missions I'm sure many of us have been drooling over in Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter.

Mission Impossible

There are 11 new missions here in Summit Strike and they are mostly pretty good. There's a more open-ended feel to many of them compared to the original Ghost Recon, which leaves you more of a choice how to tackle the objectives given to you.

Several of the missions require you to clear out two or three enemy positions widely scattered on the map. It's up to you to choose which order to do this, taking your squad (or solo in some missions), taking note of the terrain shown on the map and the cover you may be able to exploit.

The game works best when you're playing with a squad of AI soldiers. I'm not so keen on the solo missions, they seem at odds with the whole Ghost Recon ethos and I wish there were fewer Lone Wolf missions. However the squad missions are great fun, just as tense and action-packed as the original GR2 game.

Smarts

Supposedly the squad AI has been worked on but you still don't have much control over the other soldiers. You can still order them to advance or flank an enemy, or perform certain actions. But how they do this is often rather arbitrary and I often found my AI troops bumping into me and failing to move forward when told to advance.
They do take up covering positions and are pretty good shots, you at least won't feel like you're playing a solo game or that they are mere cannon fodder. The enemy AI is pretty good, and on the harder difficulty level put up a mean fight and are an excellent shot.

Like much of modern warfare, it's not being a good shot that will help you complete the missions, seeing the enemy before you see them is paramount. While thankfully not a stealth game, Summit Strike works best when you are able to creep up on an enemy position before taking it under fire. It's just a shame the squad control doesn't allow you to set up crossfire positions or ambushes.

Visuals

Ghost Recon 2 was a great looking game, with lush vegetation, swaying trees and attractive open grasslands. There's more of the same here in Summit Strike but with added new environmental effects. Drifting windborne blizzards and sandstorms are the order of the day and moving skies add to the overall quality of the scenery on offer.

The character models look the same, but are of a high standard. The explosions are great, there's a real sense of destruction when a LAW round meets up with an enemy personnel carrier. There are few Xbox games that look as good as Summit Strike.

The frame-rate isn't particularly good though. This isn't as much of an issue as you might expect. This isn't a run and gun game, it requires more patience and stealthy movement and so the lack of fast update doesn't seem to hinder the quality of the visuals.

Multiplayer

The real core of Summit Strike is in the local and Xbox Live multiplayer missions. As in GR2 you can play against or alongside your friends, attempting missions together or fighting it out squad vs. squad. There's nothing more fun than taking a squad of friends out against the enemy troops, with AI set on hard and the radar turned off.

The game then becomes one of fear and paranoia as your squad is surrounded by accurate hardened troops and the only way you'll detect their presence is by seeing them yourself. New game modes are featured here in Summit Strike, with Heli Hunt being one of my favourite new additions.

Sadly the mess that is the GR2 menu system remains, meaning that setting up a multiplayer game is never as simple as it should be, many of the options being buried inside menus. But the quality of the action is so good that one can live with some crummy menus with the hope that we don't have to suffer the same in Advanced Warfighter.

Mission End

So in Summit Strike we have more of the same. Ghost Recon 2 is one of the best shooters available on Xbox, and with Summit Strike being a stand alone product at a budget price it really is a steal. The problems with the menu system remain and the control is a little lacking of your squad.

However as a multiplayer game it really is rather stunning. It's the best realistic shooter on Xbox Live and it's only real rival might be the forthcoming Operation Flashpoint Elite, which may steal some of it's thunder. But until then, this is the place to come for excellent online military antics.