Co-op rules!
The aerial drone once again makes an appearance, only this time you’ll be able to see an aerial view of the battlefield on a full-screen. There didn’t appear to be any option to turn drones off in multi-player which basically means that if you run out in the open it’s more likely that the opposition will spot you, so sneaking around in the shadows and sticking close to cars, trees or even darting underground will be a wise move if you see a drone hovering above. Enemies can shoot the drone down, which is probably going to be a wise tactic to adopt early on in a battle and the fact that the view is now shown on a full screen means that once again you’ll need to have someone watching your back.
We’ll talk more about the new addition, the mule (an armoured ground drone which can re-supply your team) in our single player review shortly. The mule does not feature in multiplayer.
SUMMARY
The highlight of our time playing multiplayer was the 16 player co-op mode. Yes! That’s 16 player co-op! There are a good variety of options available such as normal missions or attempting to hold off infinite numbers of enemies for a set amount of time (hilarious!) and it was a great way to hone our skills on the battlefield and learn new tactics with friends which will come in handy when we take on real-teams over Xbox live. The AI, for the most part, is extremely sharp, despite the odd nob-head running straight past us, and on the higher difficulty level, it was extremely difficult to hold off swarms of attacking rebels, even though we had 8 players on our team. Luckily, Ubisoft has also thrown in a ‘heal’ function, which we used frequently. It’s simply a case of reaching your fallen buddy before he dies and resurrecting him with a simple press of a button.
Overall, the AI seems to have been stepped up a notch so it’s also important to know where all of your team-mates are; the new Cross Com feature and the drone are more critical than ever before.
Click for larger imageGRAW 2 is looking fabulous and is already playing like an award winner. It has next-gen presentation, next-gen graphics and features that we’re coming to expect from AAA titles (such as clan support, up to 100 members in a team). In October last year GRAW won the BAFTA for game of the year and in 2007 GRAW 2’s going to be in with a decent shout at the title.
We'll have an in-depth review of the single player and more about the gameplay shortly.
