Ghost Recon

For me this games rocks. With Tom Clancy you can expect great plot and concept. It has great graphics, especially the drawing and animation of character. The game also has excellent sounds. Every rifle and pistols have different sound. You can feel the bullets passing your ears.

This game is a combination of First-person shooter and Squad-based Real Time Strategy. Not like other first person shooter games which you rely in fragging, shooting and jumping. This games focus on stealth and strategy. The success of your mission depends on the way you maneuver your squad. And the life of your men is in your hand. If you plan to have a military career someday, play game.

I have mixed feelings about Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon. The actual gameplay is just pure brilliance; Red Storm traded the arcade run-and-gun style of games like Quake and Unreal for realism (one bullet can actually kill you, enemy opponents take cover if fired upon and don't just run blindly into your bullets). These changes pose a different kind of challenge to the player without taking away any of the enjoyment. There is nothing that quite gets the adrenaline pumping like stalking your enemy knowing that one careless step or missed shot could end your soldier's life instantly.

For me Ghost Recon was one of the first games where the artificial intelligence of your team-mates and opponents were actually worthy of the tag – artificial intelligence. You're team-mates won't beat the missions on you're behalf, but are generally useful backups to have in fire fights and won't get stuck inside buildings or get themselves killed in idiotic ways too often. As hinted upon above, your enemies are competent adversaries (a Rambo walking around with guns blazing would only last a few seconds before succumbing to a head shot). My only gripe would be that their observation range seems somewhat short, while they react realistically to gun-shots falling around them, a lot of times they seem oblivious to any sounds further than 30 feet away. That said, being repeatedly killed by super intelligent & observant enemies would probably be no fun at all! At 2001 standards, the graphics were OK without being brilliant, and by today's standards they are not bad enough to detract from a good gaming experience.

So why the mixed feelings? The big letdown for me was the storyline. Yes there is a story, Russia invading Georgia in 2008 (how prophetic for a 2001 game!), but the implementation was distinctly lackluster. There are no cut-scenes to speak of, a weak low-budget intro movie and no end movie. Mission briefings consist of 2 maps and a brief written overview of what's happening in the global war effort along with your mission objectives. It's hard to know if your successful missions have any effect on the war effort as they are barely, if at all, hinted upon in the following mission briefing. In my opinion if they just called the game Ghost Recon and let you play the 15 missions randomly it would have made no difference to the experience, but because they plastered a famous novelist's name on the title I expected a bit more story for my bucks.

That said, if you are considering buying the game, you can't go wrong getting this title. This game will give you many thrilling hours of gameplay and as I understand the multi-player is also not too shabby. Oh and for the record, it didn't bother me that I couldn't see the barrel of my gun on-screen (a common complaint from other reviewers).

Tom Clancy's "Ghost Recon" is so real it makes one have to slap themselves after they are done playing to ensure they are back to reality.

Unlike most games where your player has tons of "health" and can take fifty shots till he goes down, in "Ghost Recon," the Ubi Soft game engine gives the player about one shot and they're down, or two/three if it's a minor wound. Talk about realistic.

The sounds are wonderful. Unlike the loud, unrealistic "blams" most games offer when a weapon is fired, "Ghost Recon" offers realistic little cracks of a rifle.

The gameplay is amazing, and the level detail and graphics are nothing short of incredible.

Imagine walking through a demolished Russian town, your troop regiment behind you, three allied tanks surrounding you. Rain is pouring down from above. All of a sudden, a crack sounds, and one of your men is down. A tank is the next down, after an MI-36 hits it. You have to think quick. You have to search the demolished buildings around you for the enemy, who is most likely hiding up in some blown-apart room.

That's what "Ghost Recon" is: one of the best video-games to date.

5/5 stars --

John Ulmer

For me, Ghost Recon is a poor game. You could say that I am biased, since I prefer action style games rather than stealth and strategy, but I must say I was truly disappointed when I played this game. It is also too short, with 15 levels. I recommend the Delta Force series for army or military games.

4/10

This is still it - THE best tactical shooter on the market today! I started playing Ghost Recon when it had just been released back in 2001, and I loved the game from the very beginning. Other shooters have come and gone since then, with better graphics, better physics engine, better this, better that... but none come close to the depth of game play Ghost Recon provides.

Sure, it has its visual and maybe technical shortcomings in today's gaming world, but Ghost Recon compensates you with its unrivaled immersive atmosphere, with an unparalleled sense of realism, and with an amount of re-playability never again found in any other shooter game offering. There is a good reason Ghost Recon has been named "the thinking man's shooter" time and time again.

Playing Ghost Recon in multi-player Co-Op with some friends against enemy AI - whether in full-scale campaign missions or the simpler Firefight mode - is still a sheer joy, and so it comes as no surprise that even today you will find people playing Ghost Recon online pretty much 24/7.

To resort to the old cliché: If there was but ONE game I could take with me on a desolate island (that happens to house a powered computer), this is it - Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon - the only REAL tactical shooter out there, the best of its kind!