Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter for the PC is a fantastic game. Fantastic, that is, until it freezes.

I have consistently run into problems with the graphics freezing while the game continues. The latest update (1.10) is installed and drivers are current. Surely there is some magical combination of pre-render settings or XML tweaks or other hokus pokus that will make this game run, but it really shouldn’t be up to the gamer to sort all this out. Scanning the forums at ubi.com turns up plenty of others with the same frustrations. Ubisoft should work these issues out before releasing the game.

The mad rush to release software on time or less late distracts companies from releasing a fully-tested product. Sure GRAW is beautiful when it’s running, but that only makes the glaring problems that much more glaring. So, Ubi, thanks for the game but please pay more attention to quality assurance.

Update: Installing NVTweak and lowering “max frames to prerender” is supposed to help in some cases. In this case the answer is maybe it did. Once installed I still experienced freezing, but also lowering graphic settings to low and selecting trilinear texture filtering seems to have done the trick; I’ve managed to get past the graphics freeze I hit before.

A gamer should not be required to fiddle with undocumented video card settings to keep a game, purchased with hard-earned money, running.

Tags: Mini-review · PC · Platforms