Remember that happy feeling when you fired up your Xbox 360 for the first time with GRAW in it? You will get that feeling all over again. Is GRAW 2 really all that different from GRAW? No, but does it need to be?
Gameplay/AI
The gameplay remains basically the same. There are some nice improvements to the way that you use your . . . whatever that overhead robot-viewer-thing is called. When it is selected, just click and hold your right shoulder button and you get a very nice full-screen, top-down view of the terrain while you move the robot thing around.
If the enemies in the first one were middle-school level baddies, they seem to have at least moved on to junior high in this one. I noticed a couple of them move from cover to cover, which is more than the "I will stand here and shoot you til I die" mentality of the Mexican warlords from the first GRAW.
You get a medic on your team now (I guess the crude form of home surgery you practiced on your wounded compatriots in GRAW one won't cut it any more), and Joe Ramirez and some other familiar solders seem to have made their way into this game. Not sure if your own guys are smarter, but some Mexican warlord was shooting a mortar at us, and my friends kept screaming "Omigawd, we're gonna die. Run!" or something to that effect to indicate that we in range of a mortar. You can also drive the MULE around, so I guess if you run out of bullets it will always be there for you.
Graphics
Shocker: this game looks even better than the first GRAW. The things that make it really jump out are a little more detail, maybe a little less jaggies, a lot better smoke (I know, I didn't think it was possible either), better explosions, cool camera effects from your robot-viewer-thingy overhead, cool heat effects in the distance. It looks a lot like the first game, because you are still fighting in the same terrain, but it seems that, at least in the demo, it is a little more open.
Too bad the demo is single player only, but the game comes out in 6 weeks, so not long to wait. This is definitely worth a download.
[Thanks KM]
