Controls play a massive part in the game's success. Advanced Warfighter is all about how you interact with and utilise all your wish-fulfillment war toys, and a balanced, manageable interface is crucial. As such control of your character - the hard-bitten Captain Scott Mitchell - is kept smart and simple. The sticks manage moving and aiming, with Mitchell automatically assuming a cover position when you press him up against any object or surface. The fiddle-free system is a blessing, as this is where you'll spend much of your time - leaning out or over walls and obstacles to fire, tapping R3 for close targeting and another button to hold your breath and steady your aim. Selecting from your four available weapons - long and short range, two types of grenade - is similarly easy, with each option mapped onto the D-pad.
Adding more complexity are the additional controls for issuing instructions to your three-man Ghost team. Before each mission you're given a very short briefing about what you'll encounter - type of terrain, strength of opposition - and you can then balance your squad accordingly by selecting soldiers with medical knowledge or specialist weapons expertise. Once deployed, your boys rely on you for commands entirely, and they won't even move without your say so.
Aiding your operational organisation is the ability to see from your squad's perspective using your networked com units. In an improvement over the original Advanced Warfighter, the entire screen can switch over to their head-cam, from which you can glean tactical info and also identify positions to advance towards and targets to attack. Ultimately, this is the key to the game's success - switching between cams and coordinating an assault is really, really good fun, especially when you're given additional support units.
First up these are simple, coming in the form of an airborne drone which will scan the battlezone, identifying enemy units and plotting a route to your objectives, or you can use an ammunition mule which carries extra equipment, and which you can also use like a remote control piece of cover. Later on you'll also be given use of a Stryker APC - one of the game's standout missions sees you marching behind the tank-like armour unit as it rumbles down a war-torn road, ordering it to fire on lurking insurgents - and a "Little Bird" Gunship.
