Ghost Recon 2: Summit Strike for the Xbox

Author's Rating:

Pros: Great graphics and sound, good challenge

Cons: Not the type of shoooter for everyone

The Bottom Line: 
If you prefer brains over brawn when it comes to shooting games, check this out.

Author's Review
Ghost Recon 2: Summit Strike is a first person shooter for the Xbox. This is the kind of shooting game that requires strategic thinking and a lot of patience. It involves a pretty high level of realism that means if you go running into an enemy encampment with your guns blazing, you won’t last two seconds. Some people dig that kind of gameplay and some don’t.

After playing Battlefield 2: Modern Combat until I had memorized every nook and cranny of the maps and gotten bored with the whole thing, I decided to move on to a more thoughtful shooting game. I’d played the original Ghost Recon on Windows PC and knew a little about the series, plus a found a good deal on a used copy of this game at my local Game Stop, so I picked it up. Overall, I was very impressed with the entire package.

In this game, you are part of a team of soldiers trying to find a terrorist from Pakistan. This terrorist has been causing problems in the nation of Kazakhstan, and your job is to go in there and take him out. Most of the game takes place in mountain areas so you have lots of places to climb and hide. It also gives the enemies a lot of places to hide from you. If you’re a fan of Borat, this is the same country he claims to be from. That would have been funny to see him show up in an Easter Egg, but I didn’t find one. This game came out a couple of years before the hit movie did, though.

One thing I loved so much about the Battlefield series were the giant maps, and this game also has huge maps for you to explore. Some of your missions will take you an hour or more of real time to complete, but you can at least save your progress along the way. I much prefer to have lots of places to go and work out approaches than be forced into linear pathways like some games do. This is a game where the environment is used as part of the gameplay, rather than just being scenery.

If you are used to the kind of break-neck shooters where you have lots of health and armor and can take a bullet or two, then you’ll probably find this game very difficult at first. This is the kind of game where a couple of shots mean you’re dead. The enemy soldiers are also quite accurate, and their AI is very good. Luckily, the AI of your squad is equally impressive. Don’t think you can hang back and let them do all the work, though.

Graphically, this is probably one of the best looking games I’ve ever seen on the Xbox. I say that because quite often you’ll find yourself in a shoot-out with an enemy who is so far away that you can barely see him move. A great amount of detail is required to pull this off and make the game still playable, and I really liked that. You need sharp eyes to play this game. The environments are all full of detail with snowy mountains, trees everywhere, buildings, vehicles, and so on. Even the soldiers look good and you can tell them apart. The color palette for this game is all over the place, so it never looks the same all the way through.

I was also impressed with the sound in this game. Voice acting is in constant effect because there’s a lot of communication going between the soldiers, plus you can hear the enemy soldiers talking to each other. The sound effects are very well done for this type of game, and sometimes the sound of distant gunfire can trip you out when you realize that you’ve been spotted.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to test the multiplayer aspect of this game because I cancelled my Xbox Live subscription a while back. It got to where hardly anyone was playing those old Xbox games on there anymore, and it wasn’t worth the price for me to keep the service just to play one or two games. I’ve heard this game is good online, though. Since it is a couple of years old, I can’t tell you if anyone is still playing.

I enjoyed Ghost Recon 2: Summit Strike for its look and feel, plus the gameplay was genuinely fun and somewhat realistic. This is a thinking person’s shooting game, and definitely worth a try if you’re willing to put the time into it.