Warfighter Day

Mark suits up for some spookily authentic real-life GRAW action...

Ubisoft certainly knows how to do a press trip. Last year they not only whisked us off to Paris for a spot of pre-launch Wii playtesting, but several months before that, placed us unapologetically in the line of fire, clad in Ghost Recon-esque camo suits, at the High Wycombe Paintball Centre. It was an intense, frantic and oft-painful morning that gave way to an afternoon of then-cutting-edge GRAW multiplayer gaming, and left us all with a new appreciation for the realism of the Scot Mitchell fronted hi-tech shooter series.

With Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2, however, the GRAW brand has undoubtedly evolved – and thus, so too, had this year's Ubisoft's journo-pleasing junket.

Formerly named Laser War, the now-rebranded Northampton-based Warfighters was to be the location for the 2007 GRAW 2 press day. It's an outfit with a direct affiliation with Ubisoft's Ghost Recon games that promised a real-life laser-fuelled battlefield closer than ever to the franchise's own tactical take on digital warfare.

Our mission, as we chose to accept it, was to take out six camo-wearing ex-SAS squaddies, in but a small square of the 9000 acres of farmland available, on a mission designed to closely resemble the GRAW games themselves. Toting thousand-feet-ranged laser artillery and due to be lead into the fray by our own battle-hardened commanders, our fifteen-strong twitch-gaming-conditioned team were understandably confident before things got underway.

That confidence, as it turned out, got us all very dead, very quickly. Piling out of a green and brown Land Rover, sprinting across boggy terrain and huddling together against a fence was all very well – but in the ensuing seconds an ill-fated collective bolt for the nearest fence saw things go a bit Saving Private Ryan; our entire platoon mowed down by a vicious battery of enemy fire... from just two unseen snipers. A daunting insight on the mortality of real-life troops which couldn’t help but leave a chill on our already wind-wearied frames.

Luckily, like its videogame namesake, Warfighters offers respawns, by way of a handheld medikit shaped something like an oversized ipod. That's probably just as well, as several of us – shamefully, I include myself in that number – were having problems making it to even the next waypoint; a huge hulking tank.

Encouraged to work in teams of two, we eventually found ourselves enacting – with not a little guidance, and precisely a LOT of being shouted at in abrupt army commander tones – real military movements… albeit rather badly. With one soldier moving forwards ten-or-so feet, the other would cover him with bursts of fire – being careful of friendly fire in the process – and then sprint to ten feet the other side of his compatriot; making small advances into the battlefield bit by bit.

In the end, it was that which saw us emerge victorious – flanking our camouflaged foes by splitting our forces and closing in on them like two pasty un-athletic pincers, we managed to close in and wipe them out – but not without heavy casualties. Indeed, with our 39 respawns all used up, plus our fifteen initial lives, the sobering reality set in that we’d just taken part in the equivalent of over fifty people assaulting just six fully trained professionals. "Massive damage" doesn't do it justice.

One round down, one to go – though we again seemed to fair poorly against the scarily-hardcore SAS-types. Even with maximum respawns and one of our two instructor-cum-commanders laying down smoke grenades by the fistful, we found the going heavy – not to mention muddy – and eventually it came down to a one-on-one, with the rest of us watching our last remaining player well and truly outmanoeuvred, outgunned, and simply outclassed. The high point, however had to be riding in, and piling out of, the abovementioned bonafide, genuine and fully-working tank at the start of that second round, while the whole event in general had left a definite taste for tactical war action which our upcoming GRAW 2 multiplayer session would later sate.

Play Ghost Recon For Real: Visit www.warfighters.eu

Article by: Mark Scott
Published: 22.02.07