GRAW 2 sees you reprising the role of Captain Mitchell and his team, and is set the day after the original experience. As you are returning to the US in GRAW, you are notified that the rebels are blaming the US for their failures and are intending payback. Four Ukranian RedStar 4 nuclear warheads "lost" in 1991 have resurfaced in rebel hands and they intend to use it on US targets. What's worse is that the rebels have also managed to get their hands on Pakistani Kashmiri ballistic missiles and if successfully brought into the south of US soil, the missiles can deliver the warheads to any US target. You and your team are needed to prevent this and destroy the warheads.

There are 12 missions plus an optional training mission also known as the Battle Simulator. Training is recommended if you have not played GRAW and even then it's a good start to get familiar with the enhanced graphics and gameplay of the sequel. These missions are spread across three days.

If you decide to skip training, you start off at the outskirts of the town of Juarez, Mexico. During the three days, you will make your way from these outskirts into the town of Juarez (including a graveyard) and eventually finishing off in the final showdown at the Caballo Butte dam, Texas. The missions include raiding rebel and mercenary encampments, destroying convoys or providing air support from your Black Hawk helicopter, rescue missions, a Black Hawk down scenario which will require you to blow up the crashed chopper to remove evidence of US involvement in the Mexican civil war, taking down a rebel leader in a helicopter to destroying the nukes.

Aiding you in these missions will be about 30 weapons - ranging from assault and sniper rifles, sub-machine guns, light-machine guns, pistols, a revolving chambered grenade launcher, anti-tank shoulder mounted rockets to fragmentation and smoke grenades and C4 satchels, which can take out armoured vehicles (including helicopters if used precisely). Some weapons come in different configurations, e.g. snap-on underside grenade launcher, scope and silencers. Unfortunately, these different configurations are fixed, meaning that you can't mix and match to what you'd like or modify them during gameplay. So for instance, you can only choose to have an unsilenced or silenced MP5 sub-machine gun only and you can't silence or unsilenced it during gameplay, or you can choose to have a grenade launcher on your SCAR-H or a scope but not both. For the enthusiasts, this restriction puts a slight damper on the excitement that normally comes with the ability to customise your weapons. Furthermore, there isn't any indication to the range, accuracy and lethality of these weapons, making it guesswork as to which weapon is better than the next.

In some missions you will have a tank, an APC, a helicopter gunship, an additional infantry squad, a UAV drone and/or a mule at your disposal. For those that are not familiar (or just forget), the UAV is an unmanned airborne spy unit that can be used to locate rebel units, particularly snipers, and the mule is best described as an unmanned mobile armoury that you can use to restock ammunition or change weapon loadout. Like all units, both UAV and mule are also vulnerable to gunfire. A pretty cool feature of the game is that you can view the environment from any unit that you command, which gives you a feeling of being the unit. Of course, a more functional use of this feature is to sniff out enemy units. For instance, when the UAV is not available or enemy units are hiding under cover (e.g. in a building) sending a tank into a hotspot will allow you to pinpoint rebel units without getting yourself in harm's way. You can then order the tank to take the rebels out and watch from the tank's cockpit or flank them and do the deed yourself.

There are three difficulty settings - low risk, guarded risk and elevated risk. There doesn't appear to be a marked difference between the difficulty settings (even though there's supposed to be), except that you can more hits in the lower options. Thus, changing difficulty doesn't really make much for replay value.

Even on guarded risk, it isn't going to be a cakewalk against the rebel army - even with the vast array of firepower at your command. This is mostly thanks to the intelligent AI, which is also similarly armed (come to think of it, it is a tad odd that the Mexicans are also armed with M1A2 tanks and Bradley APCs, both of which are of American origin). Rebel infantry normally isn't a problem unless faced with a hoard - where some will keep you pinned down and others will try to flank you and take you out.

However, snipers will make short work of you and your men and anti-tank gunners and rebel armour will have similar effect on your armoured units and gunships. Occasionally, there is a glitch in the AI's pathfinding, resulting in the rare occasion where your units get stuck. This usually happens only when your units are following you or when you order your units to regroup. However, your infantry units (including your team) seem to have problems keeping up with you and this is rather annoying, especially when you need their fire support. You can circumvent this by ordering your infantry units to positions before you make a move yourself. This can be a slight pain for those that are impatient or like to take point instead of sitting back and watching the action. Perhaps this is GRAW2's way of encouraging the use of this feature, making (or more like forcing) the game to be more of a tactical shooter.

Luckily these, and the fact that the single-player game mode (also known as campaign mode) only takes six hours to complete even in the elevated risk difficulty, are the only downsides of the game. The game only gets better.

The graphics are great, significantly improved from GRAW. Everything is superbly detailed and highly realistic, including the animation. In one mission, you are in a Black Hawk, manning its MH-134 chaingun, hunting rebel convoys and it is raining. The rain is splattering on the exterior of the Hawk and there is a water trail streaming off the barrels of the gun. This is done so realistically that you could actually believe that you are there.

In another mission, you are raiding a rebel camp. From afar you have just pacified the guards outside the cave entrance of the camp, when suddenly, you hear whistling in the air followed by loud explosions - mortar! You have to make a mad dash towards the entrance or get blown to bits. As you run, you see explosions and debris flying all over. Again, so realistic that you'd think that you were right in the middle of a warzone.

Of course, video is nothing without audio, and the audio for GRAW2 is just as amazing. The gunfire and explosions are loud and realistic and the voice acting is very convincing and top-notch. One of the nicest touch is your team shouting out the location of rebels, which is surprisingly accurate, allowing you to react quickly in intense firefights.

Gameplay is intense and highly absorbing. As earlier implied, firefights with rebel infantry and armour can be fast, furious and exciting, especially in some missions when you can order in air support (in the form of fighter bombers) to take them out. However, arguably the best missions will involve you taking down rebel gunships. In one mission, you are in your Hawk, you have to take down a couple of gunships with your chaingun while your pilot swerves violently to try to evade their fire. Another sees you trying to take down two gunships simultaneously from the ground with nothing more than a grenade launcher. In this sequence you have to be quick to let loose a few grenades and return to cover to reload, and at the next opportunity duck out and fire off another barrage of grenades on the gunships until they are no more. If you are too slow, you'll be ripped to shreds.

While single-player mode is too short, replay value is enhanced by the multiplayer mode. Maps in multiplayer are large (enough to comfortably support up to 16 players), designed well and visually inspiring as in the single player mode. There are two forms of multiplayer, competitive or co-operative. Competitive is the usual formula of deathmatches to simple single objective types. One nice touch in this multiplayer form though, is that each map can be choosen with different time of day, giving a different feel to a map. You can also turn on an off various options, such as bots and what weapons and gear are available.

However, co-operative is much cooler. It is essentially a six mission game complete with a story, in which you can play with up to 15 other players. Compared to the usual deathmatches, this is more life-like, in that it gives the illusion that not only are you part of an elite squad but there is a plot with "real-life" objectives (i.e. sure beats the deathmatch objective of a massing the most kills).