Going into Ghost Recon 2, I was expecting a moderately entertaining third person shooter that featured some sort of strategic angle. After all, other games in the Tom Clancy series have all boasted high quality gameplay concepts. However, as they say, there’s always a runt in the litter, and Ghost Recon definitely fits the bill. I’d go as far as to say that this title is one of the worst games in my library. Going through, there were times when I wanted to stop – to pull myself away from the blinding pain. In other words, I was let down to the greatest extreme.

The storyline is as follows: A U.S. military ship was recently attacked by a North Korean general. Seeking retribution, the President has only one option. Taking the advice of his cabinet, he deploys “The Ghosts.” When it comes to plot, this one is certainly passable, however generic it may be.

Unfortunately, just as I was becoming interested in the story points, I was tossed into the actual game, and it all went downhill from there. Your very first mission will have you leading your squad to take over a key point being occupied by the North Korean military. Sounds simple enough, but it’s made incredibly frustrating by virtually every detail of the gameplay. Chief among these problems is that your squad couldn’t shoot air if their lives depended on it. AI is mostly absent in this game, making the three soldiers you have command over more of a hindrance than backup.

The way controlling your team is supposed to work is that you’ll press the A button and choose one of four options (fire, hold position/regroup/cease fire, throw grenade, and take point) to gain ground during a mission. However, most of the time your team will either refuse to carry out orders for some absurd reason or they’ll just ignore your command altogether.

So, to put it simply, you’re better off on your own. And I honestly wouldn’t have minded all that much if I was anything close to being useful myself. Limited weaponry, an often choppy frame rate, and non-responsive controls do not a good soldier make. Aiming helps to take down your enemies, but the speed in which you can move your focus is constantly in a state of flux. Never before have I experienced a game so incompetent.

After being indefinitely put off by the campaign, I decided I’d try some multiplayer fun in the Quick Mission mode. To my dismay, though, no multiplayer is offered. Yes, you read that right. In a shooting game, no multiplayer is offered. It boggles the mind. “Alright, I said. If I can’t take on my friends, maybe I can still have some fun on my own.” Not a chance, sadly. Quick Mission is just as boring, buggy, and quite frankly just as terrible as the story mode.

As if this wasn’t enough, the level design and mission structure is drab and far too linear. Environments looks massive, but you’ll soon find that there’s a central path to take, and all others are blocked by invisible walls. Any sort of strategy is squashed out by the limitations of the setting. Even trying to descend from a two-foot ledge results in death.

Oh, and you’ll die very often, indeed. On the lower right corner of the screen you’ll see a small box that details your current health through color, and you’ll have to constantly keep an eye on it, as you have little to no reaction to being shot, other than a brief lowering of the hue (which also happens when you fire a weapon, so it’s a mission in and of itself, to try to differentiate between shooting and getting shot). And again, thanks to the extreme lack of polish in the gameplay, you’ll frequently die just because the camera wouldn’t let you see your enemy (it often changes without warning) or due to the hopelessly choppy frame rate.

When it comes to visuals, Ghost Recon is very misleading. It teases you with a plethora of high-quality cinemas and screenshots, but once you actually start to play the game, any hopes of an excellent aesthetic event is endlessly crushed by the aforementioned time lag, drab environments, and faux rag-doll physics. Ghost Recon 2 may look good, but you’ll soon find it’s just a pretty outer shell covering up pure evil within.

One area without any real problems is the audio. Narration and voice acting aren’t stellar, but they are tolerable and even enhance the experience at times. In-game themes aren’t nearly as good as their cut-scene counterparts, but they’re still enjoyable enough.

Aside from that, though, Ghost Recon falls flat on its face and fails to offer anything to enjoy. Gameplay is flawed, the controls are unresponsive most of the time, and the visuals are stuck in 2001. At all costs, avoid this game.