The original Ghost Recon was a well received tactical shooter for the PC that was successfully ported to consoles. Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon 2 was created from the ground up for consoles, but is sadly lacking in anything that might raise it above the title of “mediocre shooter.”

The environments of Ghost Recon 2 are average at best. Between the various jungles and military bases you “explore” (and I use that term loosely), you won’t run across any breathtaking vistas that make you pause and soak up the beauty. No, what you get are glum and uninspired visuals that don’t seem to make any real interesting use of the GameCube’s hardware. I don’t expect the environments of a real world-based shooter to necessarily be “pretty,” but they must at least be exciting.

The audio aspect of the game is, thankfully, a little more interesting. The most impressive part is that a game actually managed to have the volume of voices balanced with sound and music properly. The voices didn’t make me turn down my volume when they came in, but I could still discern what people were saying amid firefights and explosions. Aside from that, well, it’s a military shooter; you have the sounds of guns, tanks, and planes. Then there’s the obligatory uplifting soundtrack, heavy on the trumpets. If you don’t like that stuff already, you probably won’t be into these kinds of games anyways.

The idea is that Ghost Recon 2 is supposed to be a squad-based shooter like its predecessor. However, unlike the original in which you controlled two squads of soldiers, Ghost Recon 2 only allows you to control one squad. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. However, the limited functionality of your extra men leaves it feeling primarily like your typical one-man versus the world FPS.

Unlike similar series’ of that nature, Doom, Half-Life,, etc., which have fictional environments, weapons, and enemies, Ghost Recon 2 features familiar, and often repetitive, environments, a limited arsenal of weapons, and a relative lack of diversity in enemies. Since the levels are linear and lack any real sense of exploration or flexibility in how you move through them, the game ends up being terribly repetitive. Oh sure, there are some interesting scripted sequences throughout the game, but they aren’t impressive enough to make the dull sessions in between seem worth it.

Unfortunately, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon 2 is challenging in only the most frustrating of ways. In just about every level, there is at least one point where you’re going to die the first time and won’t be able to get through unless you already know exactly what’s coming. The game doesn’t do a terribly good job of leading you into the game with some relatively easy scenarios either. Oh no. You jump right in right away, and by the second mission, you have to deal with needing to blow straight through a whole airstrip full of soldiers without stopping. Not an easy feat when this is one of those games that promotes using cover, and where you’ll die pretty fast in an open fire fight.

A score of fun bugs doesn’t help the game either. Tell your teammates to use grenades at your own risk. I’d say about 40% of the time, they only succeeded in killing themselves. You’ll also be amazed how often you’ll find an enemy soldier stuck on the corner of a building in a hunched position doing nothing of interest at all. Another frustrating aspect is the squad commands graying out. I was never able to wrap my head around just how it was working, because commands would change and/or gray out for no foreseeable reason during a level; it was never addressed well in the manual either.

I’ve primarily focused on the single player so far, so you might be asking “What’s the multiplayer like?” I’d love to know what it would have been like too, because the game is completely lacking a multiplayer component.

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon 2 falls flat in the presence of more contemporary, innovative, and impressive first person shooters. If you are a die hard Tom Clancy fan who just has to have it, I won’t stop you. But I can’t promise even the hardcore fan will find much to like about this one.