Given today’s real-world political climate, it’s interesting to note Ubisoft’s choice of a backdrop for its latest XBOX 360 title in the Tom Clancy franchise, Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2. The battle takes you, Captain Scott Mitchell, into Ciudad Juárez and its surrounding countryside and finishes just north of the border at El Paso. Whether Ubi thought setting the game in such locales as Iraq, Afghanistan, or some other current hotbed would hit too closely to home or step on too many toes is anyone’s guess.

What is certain is that GRAW 2 (from here on in) is considerably better and more enjoyable than its prequel. That’s good news if you’re among the majority that loved last year’s Ghost Recon and even better news if you were as frustrated by its shortcomings as I was. While many dissenters may argue that GRAW 2 was rushed out, given its release date’s relative proximity to the first title’s, I counter that it feels even more polished and thought-out than GRAW 1 ever did.

GRAW 2 plays out in third-person perspective, with an emphasis on using cover to your advantage. The game at its core is all about tactics, and the player is granted a variety of supporting units that he can cycle through, select, and order using the controller’s ‘d-pad’ and his HUD’s cross-com. The two most commonly accessible units in the game are the three-man Ghost Squad, highly-skilled riflemen, medics, grenadiers, and marksmen that the player can select and outfit at some checkpoints and the UAV Cypher, a flying recon drone that will hover over an assigned area and mark enemies on the player’s display as red diamonds. New to GRAW 2 is an attached camera on all these units for easy visibility and ordering. The player can hold the ‘right-shoulder button’ at any given point to switch views and then the ‘d-pad’ to designate targets. Other supports include a UH-60 Blackhawk, M1 Abrams Tank, and Hughes MH-6 Littlebird. At certain defined points, the player is also granted air strike support and must mark enemy targets for the pilot to bomb.

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