A wasted opportunity from a military master

This game completely befuddles me. Having played other Tom Clancy games and read of his books, I expected Ghost Recon to be one of the best games I have ever played. Part way through the game, it's not bad, but it's not really good either.

In what was probably fate, I never really played the game after getting it a few years back. That all changed last week when I became bored, realized I never gave it a fair shake, popped in the disc and entered video game purgatory.

The concept and story of the game, while not entirely original, is at least interesting and reasonably unique. Several years in the future (actually 2008), Russian forces begin invading and usurping control from neighboring countries to reform the Soviet Union. As a member of the U.S. Army Special Forces (a.k.a. Ghosts), you're tasked with leading two groups of three soldiers on various missions to prevent this from happening.

The first thing I noticed was the long load time, especially on startup, but also between menus and other transitions. I'll generally give it some slack, but the start up load really bugs me.

There are four preset control settings, many of which have the same features. Pay attention and memorize whichever setting you choose, because neither game nor the manual will ever tell you what button to push. It's not possible to program individual buttons either.

A lot of people, especially on IGN and other gamer sites, have ragged on the graphics of Ghost Recon. Are they top notch, no; in fact, you can almost tell they were ported from a PC. That being said, they're not terrible and it's still a decent 3D picture. On the other hand, the characters, both your teams, hostages and enemies, all move very fluidly.

While the visuals may not be great, the audio is fantastic. Ghost Recon uses an orchestral soundtrack, with musical reactions to in-game actions. The sound is crisp and works well to provide either a patriotic or nervous atmosphere.

As said before, you're given command over two teams of three soldiers, whom you can choose and outfit to a certain extent before each mission. The player actually assumes the role of one character, but can order the others or even swap players with the AI. Commanding the AI is done either via pushing R3 to order the other team to a certain spot, or pushing another button and bringing up an on-the-fly map that can be used to set up waypoints and/or change the aggressiveness of each team.

Each Ghost carries a main rifle and a secondary weapon/explosive/tool. The intelligence of both camps is formidable, as enemies will dive for cover and shoot you if they have the chance. However, you can usually get the jump on them, and your troops will stop moving if they ever get shot at and don't kill the shooter.

That being said, there will be many times that you will die, several of which will leave you scratching your head. Enemies will occasionally get extremely fast headshots upon first noticing you, or even take shots at the first glimpse of a body part when you know he's there. There are also many times where an enemy will be completely hidden and/or at an unknown location and you're killed trying to figure out which direction the gunshots are coming from, let alone where his exact location. The only plus here is that you can quicksave and quickload within each mission, meaning you can come back and solve the puzzle the second, or third, or fourth, etc. time around.

A radar and threat indicator can quickly show which way the gun fire is coming from and where enemies are located. Some players have complained that the radar in the PS2 version makes the game too easy by giving away hidden enemies, unless the difficulty is turned up to elite, at which point the missing radar is the least of your concerns.

The weapons in the game are a somewhat bland combination of rifles, pistols and explosives. I'm not going to go into great detail about them, but there are some differences between each make and model, but you can generally get the job done with a lot of them.

The single player campaign offers more than a dozen missions, including several from the PC add-on, Desert Siege. While that's all well and good, Ghost Recon fails to deliver in multiplayer. The only option is to play cooperative or head-on-head with one other opponent on the same PS2. There is zero internet multiplayer, unlike the PC or XBox versions. This is also a major disappointment since multiplayer has become a staple of first person shooters.