There’s a roll move. You can manually control eye-in-thesky Cypher. There’s a new Cross-Com Camera Thing™ and you
can choose what team-mates you take with you for missions. The general who shouts orders looks new, as we don’t remember a well-groomed, silver-haired fox of a man telling us to “head to extraction point now!”, but it could be fuzzy memory telling us that rather than well-informed fact. Oh, there’s now a gun that fires around corners too.

So, for the people who are reading this review eager to see what is genuinely new in GRAW 2, our work here is done. The first paragraph covers everything you need to know. Bye! Hope you enjoy GRAW 1.2 as much as you enjoyed the first one. For everyone else, there’s no doubt a gentle whiff of disappointment lingering in the air, an ever so delicate scent of sadness
accompanied with doubt. Surely, you think to yourself, there must be more to GRAW 2 than that?

No, there isn’t. It’s only been a year since the original GRAW leapt onto shelves and dazzled us with its grittiness, clever tactical play and fierce challenge to stir any veteran warfighter’s beard. In development times, 12 months is little more than a blinking of an eye. Hell, it’s barely even a fart. So, expecting an all-singing, all-dancing sequel in this short space is too much. Jesus can turn water into wine but even he would have baulked at the prospect of turning GRAW into GRAW 2 in under a year.

Not that it’s a bad game. In fact, it’s actually pretty damn good. Reprising your role as Captain Scott Mitchell, it’s the usual Tom Clancy story with the token bad guys now being Mexican rebels. You’ll soon find it’s hard to care too much about Generic God-Bless-The-USA Story 101 and instead, you’ll simply push on with the gameplay. It’s here that GRAW 2 truly shines. As Scott Mitchell, you have limited but effective control over your three supporting squad members, which means you’ll spend the majority of your gaming time instructing them to take cover here, shoot over there and blow everything up.

The artificial intelligence that crippled the predecessor has been fixed. Well, kind of. We all remember how grenadier Richard Allen decided it would be a brilliant idea to run into your line of fire, thus you accidentally shoot him, thus the mission is deemed a failure. In an effort to stop the pond life wandering into areas they don’t belong, Ubisoft has made your goons a little too hesitant. Your trained killers are the kids staring at their shuffling feet, hoping they don’t get picked for the football team. The AI is far better than it was, it’s more that Ubisoft has overcompensated than anything else.

Despite that, there’s a nice rhythm to ordering your troops about as you set up flanking manoeuvres and covering fire in wide-open terrain. It’s not quite as dynamic as Rainbow Six Vegas, which is a fancy way of saying it doesn’t feel quite as cool, but that’s because GRAW 2 deals with long-range engagements rather than the suffocating claustrophobia of Rainbow Six’s gunfights. This makes it even more obvious that the Cross-Com Camera Thing™ is an attempt to add some extra kudos and Cool Factor to GRAW 2 but, besides looking like shaky handheld camcorder footage in a Fox News war reporting way, it’s… pointless. Completely and utterly pointless. “Hey, that looks nice,” you’ll think to yourself the first time you use it, before ignoring it for the rest of the game.

You’ll also think the same about the set pieces, before cacking your pants in fear at the absolute rock solid challenge of it all. Play on anything other than Low Risk (aka Child Difficulty) and there’s a sense of urgency and drama to the action that’s almost unrivalled on Xbox 360. As predictable as some of the set pieces may seem – some of them are a virtual retread of GRAW – that doesn’t stop them from being any less explosive when the smelly stuff hits the fan. Throwing yourself against the nearest bit of cover and digging in your heels as soon as a mission goes wrong is the one thing GRAW 2 doesn’t just do right but does exceptionally well. You feel as though you’re fighting for your survival against overwhelming odds and if you crank the difficulty up to Elevated Risk, hold onto your pants. It’s not as hardcore as the original but still pretty tough.

That’s where the joy in GRAW 2 lies. The difficulty is perfectly pitched, tough enough to feel satisfying when you make it to the end of a level in one piece without ever feeling unfair or overly frustrating. Those who suck at ga… sorry, casual gamers can coo at the pretty explosions, revelling in how cool everything feels. Everyone else can get their head down, crack their knuckles and start dismantling the terrorist squads, calling upon their specialist team-mates for tricky situations. The ability to choose your team-mates can alter your tactics to a certain degree (Sniper teamed with Rifleman or Grenadier teamed with Anti- Tank Gunner?) so there’s more scope for feeling you’ve stamped your individuality on a level rather than jumped through the hoops laid out by Ubisoft.

Yet, regardless of all this, we come back to the original problem (because we’re miserable, cynical pedants who can’t let a bad thing slip past unnoticed). This isn’t a sequel. Regardless of what the number in the title tells us, it’s hard to think of this as anything but a mission pack for those who loved the original. With the controls unchanged, the location unmoved and the gameplay untouched, there’s nothing to differentiate between the two. Except for the roll move. Ahem.

It’s incredibly tempting to throw around casual accusations of laziness. Rushed development is probably closer to the truth. Small animation hiccups, erratic AI by enemies and some wonky lip-synching all point to a studio being horse-ridden to drive a sequel onto the shelves as soon as humanly possible. It doesn’t even look as nice as it should do for an Xbox 360 game. In some places, it actually looks worse than its predecessor. GRAW was never known as a game of beauty but, at times, GRAW 2 veers dangerously close to being known as a game of ugliness. Thank God for those pretty explosions, saving the day at the eleventh hour.

While GRAW 2 boasts some spectacular set pieces and a refreshing challenge, it also inherits other traits of its father’s bad DNA. Namely, GRAW 2 has trouble joining the dots between set pieces, plumping for the bad-guysand-angular-cover recipe a little too often. It could be argued that Gears Of War and Rainbow Six Vegas were guilty of the same crimes, but we’d counterargue that person is an idiot. Where Gears and Rainbow dressed up the killing rituals with mine cart rides and hostage situations, GRAW 2 plays the straight man. Find cover, flush out the terrorists, shoot them as they scramble to safety, move on. There’s an air of inevitability at the start of every mission, as you touch down to ground and start the same routine for the umpteenth time. Even the shoot-terrorists-fromthe-helicopter missions have carried over from the first outing. Only the stern challenge keeps this interesting as you head towards the next set piece, but its genre rivals have the challenge and the variety.

It’s short too. Really short. Providing you can hold an Xbox 360 pad and know how to press the buttons on it, you should see the end credits rolling in under eight hours. Maybe under six, if you’re particularly good at holding pads and pressing buttons. While there are Quick Missions and multiplayer modes, you should never see the end credits in under six hours. It’s one of the golden rules of gaming. Again, it points to a rushed development time and while we admit that those six hours are pretty damn good, it’s not an awful lot of bang for your buck.

When all is said and done, the main problem is that while games have moved on significantly in the year since the original, the GRAW series hasn’t. Nowhere is this more evident than with the cover system. It was adequate in GRAW because gamers knew no better. Now that Gears Of War and Rainbow Six Vegas have rewritten the rules, GRAW 2’s awkward pushinto-the-wall system seems ancient in comparison. You can’t even blind-fire unless you have the right type of gun. It might be argued that this is realistic but, in a game where soldiers shredded by bullets can be healed by a medic kneeling down and touching them, it simply doesn’t wash.

There’s no denying GRAW 2 is a good game with set pieces to light up talk among 360 owners and internet forums in months to come, but from Ubisoft, more is to be expected. There’s a saying that tells us the more things change, the more they stay the same. What about the less things change? Or if nothing changes? All GRAW 2 proves is that sometimes, things just never change at all…

Ryan King