The year is 2008 and fanatical Georgian separatists are attempting to take over Russia and re-establish the old republic. Though condemned by the United Nations and countries across the world, it is going to take more than words to stop their desperate bid for power. For one small group of soldiers, the war has already begun. Working in small teams of 6, these highly specialised men are ready to do what it takes to prevent the Georgians from succeeding. They will do so under such a veil of secrecy and with such stealth and ingenuity, that nobody will even know they were there. They move silently, they kill quickly, they carry out their mission at all costs and then they vanish… like ghosts.

Ghost Recon is a frighteningly realistic simulation of combat in the field, so if you're only interested in Unreal style fragging, then this game is not for you. If, however, you want to experience the tension, adrenaline, sorrow and glory of being a soldier, then you won't get much nearer to the real thing than this. The action for the main story takes place over a series of 15 missions, each with multiple objectives and set in different locations with widely varying environments, both at day and night. You begin with a training level that is pretty dull and also quite annoying at times, but it is worth working through as it doesn't take long and is a useful introduction to the weapons and movement. Once you've got through that, it's into the game proper.

In the first mission you must trek across mountain hillsides to eliminate an enemy encampment, then infiltrate a cave hideout, wipe out the guards and capture one of the Georgian leaders. The first thing you will notice is just how real everything seems. The combination of visuals and sound is one of the most spectacular yet and although the graphics aren't as impressive as Halo, it seems far more real. Click the right thumbstick to zoom your weapon in and take a look at the scenery. There are trees and bushes everywhere, as far as the eye can see into the misty distance. The trees and their branches sway in the wind, looking amazingly real. The terrain is perhaps a little bleak, but a mountain hillside would be. As you move through the trees, you'll be able to hear the leaves rustling in the wind. Crickets buzz and birds sing around you. You can hear every footstep of you and your troops. Once onto the more open, windswept hills, the wind whistles all around you and it sounds absolutely real. If you stop at the top of the hill, with the wind whipping and whistling past you, to survey the view around, you could almost believe you were there.

As I said, there are a variety of locations to visit and they are all well put together. Some are set in remote locations, others in the countryside and others still in towns and cities. The first mission where you make your way through a deserted and war-torn town (deserted except for the many guards that is), it is a very bleak and eerie feeling - the place looks like a real town and should be bustling with life, but everything is silent. Until the gunshots ring out, that is. Other places you go to include a farm, a castle, a river, an airfield, a swamp, the ruins of a bombed village and more. All of them feature a good atmosphere. The rain and snow effects are very realistic, along with their accompanying sound effects. The night levels are very good too - pretty eerie and quiet. The green night vision feature is very valuable and makes moving guards stand out brightly against the rest of the scenery, allowing you to pick them off before they can see you. The guards and your own people look quite realistic too, in appropriate uniforms (and snipers are in full camouflage with grass covering their hats and backs.) The weapons are accurately represented too; when you look at someone you can see what weapon they are carrying once you're used to what they look like.

However, it's not all good graphically. There's a lot of fog used to hide the scenery that is constantly drawing itself in the distance. This is all very well, except for one vital thing - the night vision eliminates the fog. And so in night vision as you walk along you will see trees, houses, even hills, all drawing themselves in the distance, branch by branch and brick by brick as you get closer to them. This is very distracting and really takes an edge off the realism, spoiling all the great work the graphics otherwise do. You get used to it after a while, but there is simply no excuse for it on Xbox. I'm surprised that this is the case, considering this is a PC conversion, but I suppose PC owners aren't always quite as spoilt by their graphics as we're led to believe. Also, the textures and lighting effects are very basic, giving a dull look to some of the levels and slightly marring the believability at times. The skies sometimes don't look that great either, along with the distant backdrops. But there are lovely effects to make up for this - look at the sun through the trees and if you catch it just right you'll see a rainbow coloured, shimmering ring appear in your sight, which is one of the best effects I've ever seen.

Unlike the graphics, the sound is absolutely perfect and features the most incredibly realistic effects I've ever heard. As well as all the atmospheric stuff like weather and wildlife, all of the weapons fire sounds so good - it's very loud and with 5.1 surround sound you can literally hear the gunfire all around you in the more war-torn, heavily guarded areas you will infiltrate. Each weapon sounds different and more often than not you will use sound to detect the location of an enemy before your eyes manage to spot him. There is no in-game music (thankfully) and the menu music is fine. One of the most realistic and frightening things is the way the physics of the bullets seem to be so real. You actually hear them whiz past your ears and ping off the trees, rocks and grass around you and it's just incredible. The voice acting is very good too - each soldier has a different voice and speech is kept short, informative and unemotional, as you would expect from a professional soldier in the field. Your team mates use the radio to tell you that they've received orders, killed an enemy, report a wounded or killed team member, call for back-up when taking fire and so on. It's a very good touch and makes you feel like you're playing with real people, rather than just a computer.

Before you being each mission, you are given a briefing on the situation, along with a map that displays each objective location (the last objective normally being to reach the extraction point). You can then either auto-assign the members of the team or pick your own. After you've played a few missions, it's worthwhile spending a few moments learning what all those stats mean, as your team selection has a big impact on how the game plays. There are four types of soldier available - the regular soldier who has a range of weapons choices at his disposal, the heavy weapons expert who brings the serious firepower, the sniper and the demolitions expert who can use anti-tank rocket launchers and timed, remote or sensor-activated explosives. Each soldier is rated for weapon skill, endurance, stealth and leadership qualities Weapon skill is not just accuracy, but how quickly they can line up a shot, endurance is how many hits they can take before they die, stealth is how difficult it is for the enemy to see them and leadership has a positive effect on the whole group. For every 3 points a group leader has, each skill of the other team members is increased by 1 point. Every team member also gets a point for each successful mission, which can be assigned as you see fit. As well as this, there are different weapons combinations to pick from - a primary weapons and secondary equipment, which can be another weapons (generally a projectile based one like a grenade or rocket launcher), grenades, extra ammo, binoculars, a silenced pistol, or explosives for the demolitions expert. Once you are used to the game, you'll begin to pick your team and their weapons very strategically.

The nature of the action is all about stealth, strategy and keeping a cool head in the face of danger. You have two teams of three soldiers under your command - Alpha and Beta teams. You can control any one of the soldiers at any time, switching through them with the Y button. Whichever character you control is the leader of their team and the other two soldiers will follow your lead. The second team will not move unless instructed, which is where the map screen comes in. Although a bit daunting looking at first, giving orders to your teams could not have been made any simpler. You use the directional pad to move a cursor around the area map, pressing A to select a location for the team to move to. You can plot any route for either or both teams, but you can then deviate your team from that route as you are in charge. This is where some strategy comes in, as you can either keep everyone together or split up the teams. Splitting up comes in very handy if you want to get two objectives completed as quickly as possible, sending one team one way and leading your team another way. Or you can both approach the same location from different directions, laying down a deadly crossfire to quickly take out the enemy.

The map screen shows you everything you need to know at a glance - displaying each soldier's name, type, team, weapons, health and position. The last two are denoted by a picture of a soldier who will either be standing, crouched or lying down on the ground and green for fine, yellow for wounded or red for dead. There is no energy bar and no healing your men in the field - you can't leave the wounded behind on their own either (to keep them out of further danger until the end of the mission), so caution is needed when you've got wounded. Also, no matter how strong you might be, one bullet to the head kills instantly and without warning. Although it's great to pick off guards with a single bullet, enemy snipers can and will do the same thing to you and half the time you don't even know where it came from! That is a good thing though as it's much more realistic and means you won't just throw yourself into danger.

The map also allows you to change each team's orders. There are two types of order - movement and action. Movement can be advance, advance at all costs or hold and action can be assault, surpress or recon. The movement is pretty obvious, but in assault a soldier will fire and kill the enemy as soon as they see them, with surpress they will fire at an enemy even after they are out of sight to prevent them from returning fire and in recon they will not fire upon an enemy unless they are fired upon or the enemy is directly in their path. The simplicity of this system makes the game very easy to control whilst still providing a depth of gameplay and strategy.

The intelligence of your team members under computer control is outstanding. They are very observant and accurate - often a battle can start and finish before you even manage to fire a shot, with your team mates doing an excellent job of wiping out the enemy. The enemy intelligence is also excellent - take out one of three guards from a distance and the other two will run for cover or start firing in your direction. They will also attempt to sneak up on you and shoot you from under cover of bushes and trees; they are a lot smarter than your average AI so watch out for them.

The gameplay of Ghost Recon is totally absorbing and immersing; you really get sucked into the action and feel like you are there in the thick of things. Objectives are generally a mixture of killing enemy forces, destroying enemy camps and equipment, gathering intelligence, rescuing or protecting friendly soldiers and artillery and capturing enemy leaders. Each mission has a good balance of objectives, including one special objective that is desirable but not essential for completion of the mission. Each special objective in the first 12 missions of Campaign mode (where you play through the whole story and if you lose men in the field you can't get them back for the next mission) unlocks a soldier with much better skills than the ones you start off with. Playing each of these 12 missions in the Quick Mission mode (pick any mission, difficulty and game mode) also unlocks an extra special weapon for these soldiers to use in campaign mode too (and boy do these weapons kick butt!) There are many other things to unlock too, including new game modes, extra maps and cheat modes, by completing certain missions under certain conditions - with 50 unlockable elements in total, this will keep you going for a while.

Ghost Recon is most enjoyable in its multiplayer mode though - you can play split screen for 2 players, system link or online, the latter being the best of course. You can play co-operatively (up to 6 real people work together to play through any of the missions from the single player game) which is a refreshing change and it's much more exciting going up against the bad guys with 5 real people on your side. As well as missions, you can have a Firefight (kill all the enemies in the level) or Recon (make it to the extraction point). Team modes available include Last Man Standing (deathmatch with respawn ranging from zero to infinite), Search and Rescue (race to get hostages back to your base), Hamburger Hill (classic king of the hill), Domination and Siege (one side defends an area that the other side must capture). Solo play includes your basic deathmatch and a cool Cat and Mouse variant, where the first person to get a kill becomes the mouse, armed with only a pistol. Whoever kills the mouse becomes the next mouse (while the killed player is restored to being a cat) and the one with the most kills as a mouse wins the match. All of these modes are tremendous fun to play and you can play on any of the maps available for the single player campaign as well as an extra batch of multiplayer maps. Without doubt, this game really comes into its own in multiplayer (especially online) although there are unfortunately fixed respawn points, allowing the more cowardly players to "spawn kill" (just stand in one spot and kill players the moment they respawn into the level).

The bad thing about online play is that Ghost Recon has a terrible system for getting online and various problems once you're there. It's the most unfriendly interface I've ever seen (for example, there is no online options menu at the man menu, you must press the start button for another menu to appear if you want to access them!) It's very hard to find any games at all online, not because there aren't any but because the game tries to match speeds with other games and eliminates most of the possibilities in the process. Games can be afflicted with severe lag and losing your connection too. However, once you've got used to the interface and the problems settle down, the enjoyment you'll get from a good long session more than outweighs the hassle.

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon is one of the most compelling, playable, realistic shooting and stealth games out there. With realistic graphics and amazing sound effects, intelligent allies and enemies, a large number of missions to play through and loads of multiplayer modes available in system link or online, this is the best strategic shooter out there, where it's waiting quietly, ready to pick you off with a single bullet…

Reviewed by Geoff Holland for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).