Night vision, as well, has been completely overhauled, and makes a dramatic difference to the playability during the phases of the game when you're playing in gloomy lighting. This simple gameplay tweak has eliminated this needless frustration at a stroke, and instead allowed Ubi to deliver a game that's both challenging and fair. Previously, you would be able to heal others an unlimited number of times, but not yourself, which meant you'd often find yourself facing the last portion of the battle with next to no health - making thing unnecessarily tough for you. Hand in hand with that is the fact that you now have a medic on hand to help you out on a limited number of occasions when the battle turns up the heat. Perhaps our chief bugbear about the original was the check pointing, and the fact that sometimes it'd expect the player to wage war for an obscene amount of time before deigning to save your progress. More significantly, Ubi has really listened to a whole host of complaints. Your feedback has been accepted Duck and cover, team. Flying over entire cities, watching plumes of smoke billow out of ruined buildings has never looked so good. This isn't a title that will inspire moans about v-sync tearing or frame rate glitches - it's very much a sign of next generation game development moving to the next phase. The general standard of the lighting and effects adds a host of subtle improvements to what was already one of the show-piece next generation titles. Not only that, Ubisoft's Paris studio has gone even further in terms of creating the kind of gritty visual opulence that you expect from a next generation system. For a kick off, the game now looks superb all the way through, with not a single hint of a glitch, bug, or any of the general craziness that seemed to routinely affect the original. In the 'fixed' column there are an extraordinary number of improvements which make a vast difference to the enjoyment levels over the course of the game. In many respects, GRAW 2 is the game that last year's version could and perhaps should have been - though this is an admittedly shorter game than last year's. Happily, almost every single thing that we complained bitterly about last year's version has been fixed. There was a real feeling of the game being so close to greatness, but being rushed out before it was ready.

It had some of the most infuriating, sofa-punching difficulty spikes of any of the big games of 2006, with inconsistent checkpoint spacing, the worst night vision system of any game ever (seriously), ridiculous health issues, ammo problems, graphical glitches, you name it. Admire the lovely visuals, wax about the intuitive control system, or the tense duck and cover squad-based gameplay, but you can't say the single player portion was exactly polished.

Ghost recon advanced warfighter