Ghost Recon 2 Preview

If any of your squad mates disregarded your warnings of the low nutrition value of lead, you can heal and even revive the fallen using proper medical treatments, but their combat effectiveness will be decreased until the end of the mission.

Hard to believe this place will turn into a pile of rubble in the next scene.

Enjoy the serene landscape while you can, soldier.

Another novelty is that now you can pick up and use enemy weapons. Ghost Recon 2 also proudly presents M8 Lightweight Assault Rifle, currently in the experimental phase as XM8. It has been introduced into the game only 24 hours after the military officials announced its development.

The game can be played from the first-person view, but the default view in the game is OTS (over-the-shoulder) view, in some circles better known as "the ass view" (which could even be inspiring when focusing on Pvt. Diaz's round Latina behind, especially if she were to wear camo-thongs... but I digress). From what I gathered, the only bad thing about the FPV is that you might miss some of the effects in the game, like the way your team-members react to explosions, etc. Well, whoever believes he wouldn't miss much if he didn't go through the intimate feelings of the entire unit in mid combat will surely be quite satisfied with the first person perspective. Red Storm believes that the OTS perspective offers increased character personalization, which is another of their tools to maximize the intensity of the overall experience. Using the FPV was a handicap in the original game as it had many limitations, but this should be completely changed.

The in-game sound effects are optimized for Dolby 5.1 systems. The game uses the Havok 2 physics engine (the overexploited ragdoll physics effect, bullets can go through some surfaces, objects are destroyed in a realistic fashion, vehicle interaction is made to appear more believable). The redesigned graphics engine offers dynamic lighting and sharp, more detailed textures, as well as a higher level of background details. The far eastern architecture in the game looks very true to life. Another technique that was used is normal mapping (it can increase shadow detail without using additional polygons). The in-game animation looks highly realistic, as all the soldiers' moves have been motion captured. If you manage to find the time for it, you can even switch to the third person camera and enjoy the perfectly smooth animation of your character. The explosions all look very impressive and effective. Red Storm claims that it now wanted to present the mayhem and tension of real combat by increasing the tempo, and the number of goals, explosions and the level of interactivity in the game. Some gaming sites even claim that the new Ghost Recon bears the atmosphere of quality war movies. On the other hand, the official site of the North-Korean government featured a mostly negative preview of the game. To each his own... It is still hard to say what the game will be like once it appears, but we have to keep in mind that it is a result of evolution, rather than revolution. In spite of the numerous novelties, the essence of Ghost Recon remains unaltered. And this is all we can hope for: Ghost Recon 2 should both be sufficiently different and sufficiently similar to the original for people to like it.