Fighting like this means that you have to push through environments quite carefully. You have to place your men so as to give them some cover and yet allow them the maximum fire-arc to hit things. Charging them out into the open will only get them a first-class ticket home - in a body bag.

This degree of man-management requires a special kind of awareness on your part - you’ll be spearheading the fighting, for sure, but you need to be aware that your men aren’t necessarily going to look after themselves. You also need to be aware that they are going to provide you with a huge amount of additional firepower. GRAW2 is a game in which you are the hero, but you’re a hero who can only take a few hits, and whose ammo is going to run out rather quickly indeed.

Aesthetically this is all quite special. Dusty, sun-baked climates are delivered with astounding authenticity, and the explosions are unlike any we’ve seen in a game. Then there’s a smattering of physics-enabled cleverness. Things in your environment spin and bounce and fall just as they should - although there were some odd bugs too, such as the time firing a bazooka knocked us onto a rooftop that we couldn't get down from because there was no climb option.

While this is a game that is heavily draped in military fantasy, it’s also one that feels deeply plausible - the setting, your tactics, the locations, it’s all what you’d want from your sneaky combat in a contemporary warzone. The multiplayer environments are also exquisite, but you’re going to have to work very hard to get any good at it. The single-player campaign - which is really rather short - is hardly appropriate training for the war zone you’re going to experience online.

Despite all that it gets right, we found Warfighter 2 dissatisfying. There are a couple of reasons for this. The most crucial one, and we’re amazed that this is still an issue in games since Medal of Honor, is that the snap, crackle and pop of its firefights are so lifeless. It’s a weedy, disconnected experience. Your rifles are all silenced, making them sound like someone smacking their lips in a nearby room, and even the impact of incoming bullets seems like little more than insects colliding with cardboard. Honestly, you only have to look at Battlefield 2 to see how that gunplay ambience should be handled. We’re stunned that it’s so weightless here.