"I need a sit-rep, stat soldier!” the commander bellows, the stress of the situation getting to him.

"ETA is five minutes, sir. We need evac for a soldier down. I've got ASATs on my six and OMFG I think John just ate his ham sandwich... including all the crusts.”

The silence in the command booth is palpable. "Soldier, can you please repeat that?”

Static bursts through the small speakers as the soldier, known as a ghost (because they were ‘never there') obliges.

"The Oopma Loompas have gone AWOL with my squad, sir. I'm pinned down like a mo-fo and I think a WTF is in order. Victor Charlie Charlie, you're gonna have to send a FTW down here ASAP!”

Back in the command room, a medic pipes up at that latest outburst. "Sir, I think we need to pull Mitchell out; he's suffering from..... acronymia!”

Okay, that's a little bit of a silly intro but I always get a laugh out of military jargon. I mean, I can pretty much work out what the hell is going on and what all those capitalised letters stand for, but whenever I approach games like GRAW 2 I know I'm going to need to have my Dictionary of Military Abbreviations and Acronyms (or DMAA) close at hand.

GRAW 2 and its compatriots fall into a category that I like to call ‘fiddly gaming'. There are simply so many things that you need to be able to do in a military situation that streamlining all of the controls and actions is quite simply, not always possible. So you inevitably come to a point where simply approaching cover, sidling up to it, equipping the correct gun (with the desired rate of fire), zooming in, holding your breath and then finally firing off a round – all of this requires quite a large commitment from the gamer, not to mention well-honed dexterity.

What I'm trying to say is that GRAW 2 is really only appealing to the type of gamer who relishes this amount of control and who is willing to learn all of the intricacies associated with quite complex in-game situations. It won't appeal to everyone, and in many respects no game does, so please do not go out and buy the game if all you love are straight up First Person Shooters and simple point-and-shoot gameplay. GRAW 2 is an entirely more subtle beast and is most suited to those of you who are ready to sink your teeth into some intense military situations (where slow and methodical will often win the day) – fans of the first GRAW game are also pretty much called to class automatically.

You once again inhabit the persona of Captain Scott Mitchell. He doesn't really have much of a personality, insisting on upholding the stereotype as a gruff military man, but hey at least we're not playing as some guy called Angus or, God forbid, Wayne (Lost Planet has cursed that name forever!). This game expands on GRAW's arsenal, and lets you take control of a squad and extra support (in the form of extra vehicles and technical doo-dads) to help you in your mission.

If you played and loved GRAW then this sequel is so close to that game that you could almost call it a half brother. Rather than being a fully-fledged member of the family, GRAW 2 at times feels like GRAW 1.5, and this is due to several things. Firstly, whilst several graphical touches such as smoke, dust (billowing plumes look awesome) and draw distance (flying into Juarez is an awesome sight to behold) are definitely better in this game, almost everything else is extremely familiar, including sound effects, weapon screens and most strikingly the game's environments (Ubisoft also seem to have a real obsession with providing fake reflections off of buildings). Anyone hoping for some more diverse levels will be disappointed here, as the short single player campaign sticks like glue to its desert surrounds, abandoned city streets, haciendas and oil refineries.

Another reason that GRAW 2 feels almost disappointing is in its underutilisation of new features. A full screen Cross-Com system sounds awesome, and for the first five minutes it is. Holding the right bumper allows you to see through the eyes of your squad, drone or support vehicle and even gives you control over most of these. It's an interesting vicarious device that I feel is underutilised in the sense that you're limited in your interactions. Popping to a team member's view can be awesome but when you give him the order to take down that sniper and then watch him try to do so unsuccessfully for five minutes, you've got to wonder if it wouldn't just be easier to do it yourself. Likewise, when controlling an armoured vehicle, it will often get frustratingly stuck on some non-existent object on the road and thus leave itself open to anti-armour fire from the enemy. It would be even cooler if you could hot-swap and completely control your support. Imagine taking on tanks in the chopper and then completely swapping to your sniper and taking control of his actions to take out that enemy soldier on the roof – stuff like that. As it is, it feels that while enemy AI has been amped up quite a bit (those bastards will flank you for sure), friendly AI seems to have been injected with a little bit of inbred DNA.

A third critique is targeted at the new support vehicle given to you: the mule. Ostensibly this thing is useful but I couldn't for the life of me work out what I was supposed to use it for, apart from it simply being a portable weapons locker. The only time it came in handy was in one mission where I needed to take down an enemy chopper. Out of rocket launcher rounds, I took control of my mule and screamed over to where Mitchell was so I could stock up and get back into the fight. But at the end of the day, whenever you start a mission or come across ally units, the game actually auto equips you with the best weapons for the mission anyway. So unless you're as blind as a mole and couldn't hit a portable dunny from ten feet away, you'll breeze through the missions with nary a thought for the mule.

But enough grumping, the game itself is actually pretty darn good. If anything, GRAW 2 feels like a tighter experience (we're talking single player here). Mission objectives are much more explicit and they do tend to change on the fly, with support coming in an out during a mission and several objectives changing focus mid-way through – just like in real military missions. There are also some really awesome moments during the single player – two favourites include a mad dash to be extracted via helicopter with multiple inbound enemy troops and then the level where you're dumped at a Mexican village with no Cross Com at all and need to reach the extraction point... all whilst taking on two, that's TWO! enemy choppers.

Yes the game is fiddly, but then it also doesn't get much more satisfying than taking down three guys with a headshot, switching to night vision to check for more and then rushing across that town square to reach the next piece of cover. In terms of balance between solo combat and squad action, I'd say it's pretty much split down the middle, and after a few hours it becomes second nature to set up a line of sight and then flank enemy patrols. As I said, this game has a lot of satisfying moments, so I'm willing to forgive it a few flaws.

Like most Tom Clancy titles, multiplayer is by no means forgotten and in many respects it's the multiplayer side of this game that will cement a purchase for you. The single player will maybe last you ten hours (I played it on normal difficulty though I'm told that hard is actually not that hard). Expect to spend significantly more time than that over Live if you love action-packed multiplayer – or if you just wanna whore those achievement points. A recent Saturday afternoon session with some XBW regulars proved the brilliance of several multiplayer maps – where objectives where constantly thrown at us and enemies swarmed like pugilistic flies to our position. Hunting helicopters, elimination, holding your ground as long as possible against waves of enemies – it's all there in multiplayer and with 16 players all up you'll be in frag fest heaven (awesome intertube connection needed of course). In fact, it's pretty much possible to just spend an hour negotiating the multiplayer MENUS! It really is that in-depth.

I need to mention the fact that a few bugs do exist. It took us a good hour to find a stable match host and a lot of the trouble stemmed from one person having downloaded the bonus map and the rest of us not having it. This also happened with GRAW, where players were pretty much forced to pay for the expansion in order to be able to connect with those who already had it. This is apparently able to be circumvented via a menu option to disable content but to my mind it simply isn't good enough – we were a group of seasoned gamers and it almost got to the point where we were ready to give up – that was until one person decided to delete the damn extra map so we could all play smoothly.

An additional complaint is that in multiplayer you still cannot stick to cover the same as you can in single player. This is quite disconcerting at times and I'm not exactly certain why it isn't allowed. Often you may find yourself sniped because you simply needed to pop out to see what's around the corner – a lack of cover options means you're much more exposed than you should be, in my opinion. In deathmatch and other adversarial modes I can understand why, but in the co-operative mission levels you really miss it.

Okay, that's my little rant out of the way. Where was I? Oh yes, the multiplayer maps are really great and in actual fact I'm left thinking that they are better than GRAW 1 and those encountered in the single player campaign. Transfer the single player experience over to the large co-op maps with multiple objectives and to my thinking you've got a pretty kick-arse experience. I guess you could look at GRAW 2 as having the two experiences in one package (tight and linear and then loose and at times emergent) but in some respects the single player game is fairly vanilla; Ubisoft really would be pushing it if they set another game in bloody Mexico.

Okay, so technically the last bit is set in the USA but to tell the truth this can be easily missed and the difference between urban environments is minimal to say the least. It's still the same wide streets, warehouses, overarching highways and sheet-roofed storage yards. However, in the heat of battle, most of that isn't going to matter at all, and you'll be more interested in finding cover and ordering your team to flank.