Global unrest should keep the Ghost team busy indefinitely, and the events in Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 (GRAW2) is no exception. The covert-ops squad is again sent to Mexico, where Latin American rebels battle to destabilize the government and oust all U.S. forces from the region. Things quickly escalate from bad to worse, as lost nuclear warheads surface, posing a severe threat to U.S. security. The Ghost team needs to suppress rebel forces, recover the nukes and leave no trace of their presence behind. All in a day's work for an elite black-ops unit.

Very little has changed from the first GRAW. Even the locale remains practically the same, with environments that range from blasted urban zones to run-down desert shantytowns. Even though these areas are supposed to be a departure from the industrialized parts found in part one, they hardly feel that way. With the bumped up graphics, the game still comprises of prettier versions of the same stuff we saw in the first game. Players can add up to three teammates to their squad and custom equip everyone with different weapons and add-ons such as combat scopes, silencers and grenade launchers. However, players will have to manually equip each soldier one at a time before the start of each mission, since there's no option to save selections to a template for easy loadout.

Players command soldiers in real time, either by clicking on the scroll wheel button to move them around, or by bringing up the overhead map screen to execute more complex maneuvers. Injured soldiers won't be available for the next assignment, so preserving them becomes just as important as keeping the main character alive, especially since each soldier has a specific area of specialization. For example, the sniper's skills usually come in very handy, but he turns out to be one of the hardest people to keep alive. GRAW2's artificial intelligence remains only so-so. Although teammates usually turn out to be excellent spotters, they have a terrible habit of getting into trouble. They often have trouble keeping up when commanded to follow, and will sometimes take a path that leaves them heavily exposed to enemy fire. To make matters worse, they're so preoccupied with getting from point A to point B that they won't return fire until they're settled in to their designated positions. Losing too many troops automatically aborts the mission, so players will usually need to exert direct control and plot out specific courses for them to follow. But parking the team in a safe area and soloing a few streets with a usually does the trick too.