"A game as confusing and complicated as it is good."

The game: Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon. The difficulty: hard. The confusion level: high.

GRAPHICS 8/10
They seem to be fine. Not absolutely outstanding, but they haven't gone back sprites, either. Depending on what kind of video card you have, this experience can vary wildly.
Characters are rendered, terrain is rendered, structures are rendered. Unimportant buildings are sometimes a box with a porch and a roof, but buildings critical to your mission are given more detail.

SOUND 8/10
Again, it seems fine. Not outstanding, yet not horrible. A bit above average, but not much. There are environmental sounds, troop movements, and troop confirmations, and of course, gunfire – but the one thing you won't find in this game is music.
In some ways, this is a lot more realistic. After all, if you're out on a battlefield conducting an operation, there's no background music. It helps build suspense. In other ways, I miss some BGM. Some soft, suspenseful orchestrated music would not lessen the experience one bit; after all, I think it would enhance it. If you have a fast enough processor, I suggest that you leave your favorite music player running in the background.

GAME PLAY 7/10
So, I'm supposed to control 2 riflemen, 2 snipers, and a support team simultaneously? In a first-person view?
It works, yes, but the frequent menu accessing and concern about who you should control when subtracts from the game play a lot. A decent AI system to control the rest of your unit while you assume command is desperately needed. The current AI simply orders a couple of your men to follow you at random intervals. If there's and obvious target, they will shoot it. If they can't find it, they get shot and die.
That is another cause of confusion. Suddenly, only you and one other unit are still alive. An enemy sniper, perhaps, hiding behind a rock has taken out the others. But there is no easily accessible record of that during game play. So when you see a couple men in the area where you last saw your units, you go to investigate. Once you hit the ground unconscious, you realize that those weren't your men. Sigh.

STORY 6/10
Story? Plot? Where? That's my impression for this category. It is, shall we say, lacking.
Now, in first-person shooters like this, you don't necessarily need a story to have fun. That fact is the only thing that allows me to classify this game as fun. So the plot, however nonexistent it may be, still receives an above average rating. But not by much.

A hard game? Yes. A confusing game? Yes. A fun and good game? Yes. So We've gone full circle. Maybe you will pay attention to this review and maybe you won't. But when you play it, I have the feeling that you will have similar reactions.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 05/30/03, Updated 05/30/03