Firing up the demo that was released earlier today, I was deluged with introduction screens that, fortunately, can be skipped by pressing the mouse button. Other than the fact that my native widescreen resolution isn’t supported (1680×1050) out of the box, I’m glad to report that the developers, GRIN, has made the interface and options PC-friendly. Being that they developed the game from the ground-up for the PC, you won’t find any consolitis with the PC version of Ghost Recond: Advanced Warfighter.

Once I’ve outfitted my Ghost team, I found myself in a helicopter, barreling towards a hot zone amongst the urban sprawl of a dense city. Once landed, we proceeded towards our target, meeting heavy resistance along the way. I can say that the game feels visceral; the sound is superb, the graphics are above-average, and since feel is important in a FPS, it feels fluid. It didn’t take long for me to figure out all the controls after looking through the Options>Controls screen. GRIN has made the game easy to get into, even commanding your team is a breeze.

I’ve already played through the demo 3 times, and I keep wanting to go back through it. Due to the unpredicatable A.I. of both the enemy and your teammates, the variations in achieving an objective, different weapons and accessories you can use, and sheer fun factor, the game seems to have great replay value, and this is just the single-player portion of the game I’m playing. Multiplayer should be a whole other ball of wax.

One thing to note with this demo is that Ageia PhysX drivers were required to be installed in order to play this game. I found that quite odd, considering it said you had to have them installed even if you don’t have the hardware in your system. There’s no report of any early-adopters of the PhysX add-on card for this game, as of yet.

Update: The “Follow” command seems to be largely ignored by your teammates. Could be a bug. Other commands have unpredictable results, as well. After a fourth play through, one of my men jumped in the middle of fire, in the middle of the street, laid down, and got sniped. The more I play, the more I see flaws.