GRAW2 SP campaign

[Brettzies]

Bought GRAW2 on Friday afternoon, played it a bit that night, Sunday night, and tonight. Just finished the sp campaign

I have to say it's definetly a beauitful game. The lighting is superb and Mitchell doesn't look quite as spaceman like this time around. Nice use of dust type effects and ominous clouds in the bg or pluming smoke. Very "cinematic" for a game. Still pretty much the "day in the life of a crisis" soldier concept, but I'm use to that now. Short but fun, some good firefights and missions. The night vision is much better then the previous version, in fact, I think the whole game is just better. I mean, it's no [GR] PC, but it is fun as far as games go.

One cool thing they did which actually kind of feels like the [GR] 3 team concept was to give you another fire team occasionally. On the second to last mission I had my 4 man team and another 2 man team. It's really like having 3 teams because you can tell your team to go cover a position while you move to another, and have the third do something else. Controlling them is kind of tricky, but you can still be effective on a small scale.

I pretty much went with the M468 on single shot through the whole game. Like I said, there are some great firefights with your team pinned down waiting for the Blackhawk to arrive. Felt very dramatic and the comments from your buddies is much better. A little more appropriate for the situation.

Things I didn't like...still:

The helicopter minigun levels. They are pretty to watch, but I just hate them for this kind of game.

The hud lines. They should just ditch them. It was better this time, but it's not fps, so not necessary.

The overload of information at times. You'll be in the middle of a firefight or trying to advance your position and you've got all these people screaming in your ear or popping up on the crosscom telling you to hurry up. The mission objective things take up too much space. The arrows and diamonds didn't seem so bad this time around, maybe because I have a bigger tv now. But overall I think it could be toned down more like PC version.

The ending. Well, I won't spoil it - not that there's much to spoil - just feels like after that "cinematic game" experience, they could at least do an ending. I didn't even get music during the credits LOL.

The reload animations. Small thing, but c'mon, this is next gen? They're still pulling out nothing and re-inserting a mag into an already loaded weapon? I know this makes things way easier on the devs, but if you're going to do third person, at least do it right. Do it RvS style where they just pull it out and pretty much stick it back in.

I still miss the old style games where you weren't playing the star. Even if you were, I prefer the "career" type game. Where you get briefed on a mission, gear up, head out, execute and extract. Even if they wanted to do something that didn't go according to plan and left you out in the field or something, they could still do that. It'd just be cool to go on missions again, instead of day trips that never ended. Heck, the whole game to me is like 3 [GR] missions really. And that's not just the xbox either.

But still, it's a fun game. Fun to play and fun to look at. As a GRJunkie I have to play them all. GR2 was the first game I played on my 360 even!

[Kurtz]

I have finished GRAW and GRAW 2, so I recommend the first game, it is a longer campaign. I think the recon function in GRAW 2 was great, but, the mission structure did not make enough use of that.

The coop campaign in GRAW 2 is superb, as are the coop missions in GRAW. Playing those with no respawn are as [GR] as it gets, especially the large maps in GRAW 2.