Dear family

As you all know, I've been in the Ghosts now for quite some time now. I've fought in the red uprising in Russia. I tangoed with Ethiopian warlords in Africa. But none of them were as frightening as my recent assignment to Cuba. As you probably know from the headlines back home, Castro died about a year ago and for the first time in a long time, democratic elections were held. But dear family, you dont know the pain and suffering that I and my squad had to endure to get those elections to happen.

It started out simple enough. I went in with my fellow ghosts to Cuba to help safeguard those elections. After fighting in two previous conflicts, we all figured this would be a piece of cake. But on our first mission our experience became a hell of gunfire and death. We went into a tabacco plantation to find two suspicous packages that were dropped by an airplane. Within two and a half minutes all of my squad mates were dead. Cut down by t-shirt and blue jean wearing' cuban thugs. Our state of the art weapons and training are all but useless against these guys who can see about three times farther then we can and can fire with pinpoint accuracy that would embaress olympic shooters (while firing automatic weapons!). The thugs from Ethiopia and Europe were babies compared to these SOB. I was lucky to get out alive by aborting the mission. But even then it took the lives of over twenty of my friends and several repeated attempts to complete the mission. I've never been more scared in my life then I was when fighting in the field. All my buddies back in college say that video games like resident evil and Doom are scary. They should try fighting in the military, then they would see what scary means.

The rest of my tour in Cuba wasent any easier. We had to slug through swamps, run through wind swept mountian ranges, and go onto a pretty beach. I will say this for our commanders, they keep coming up with interesting missions for us to go on, but I swore that we got so many "Capture the base" missions that I'm sick to death of operating in them. But each mission we went on was incredibly hard, due to those damn thugs who have supernatural senses and impossibly good aim. My fellow squad mates can just barley hold thier own in a firefight, but they constantly need me to jump in and control them directly. A bit irritating to say the least.

I thought the worst was over when we got our final mission (you folks probably shouldent read this, lest you know what happens before the press gets hold of it back home). We had found out that a punk named Priego was in charge of the military operations all along. We all wanted to go in and plug a grenade up his...well, you know. But those idiots in the top brass decided that we needed to capture him alive. Who the hell thought of that?! You should have seen the look on everybody's face when we learned that we had to do. This guy put everyone through hell, caused the death's of so many of my friends and made us all suffer, and the top brass wanted us to capture him?! What idiot thought of that?! They told us that if Priego was killed, he "would become a martyr, and that's the last thing the new government needs." Give me a break you idiots. We wanted to kill him! But alas, we went in and captured that punk, and our time in Cuba came to a dissapointing end.

But Cuba did have its bright spots. Everything was really pretty, much nicer then the deserts of Africa or the forests of Europe. And when I play the missions over again in my minds eye, I can tell where all the bad guys will be, and thus I can kill them a lot easier. So now my tour of duty with the ghosts is over, and i'm coming home. Good riddence, this mission was too damn hard anyway.

Your son
Ghost # 325

This is a great mission pack. The new missions are challenging. Be sure to visit locogamer.com to find awesome mods.

This is an awesome game but when I got it, I wasnt as attracted to it as I was with "Rouge Spear" the only MAIN difference is the missions.I guess after youve played other TC game, this 1 just isnt as good.

This is a great game. It has much more varied terain than the first two editions, and both enemy and friendly AI seem to have improved. Both sides are capable of highly effective ambush and flanking manuvers. The sniper rifles have gotten better as well.
in response to those who said the game was too short, it is the same legnth as Desert Seige, and has some cool additions to the Quick Missions.

If you liked Ghost Recon you are bound to love Island Thunder. This is a solid expansion pack. It does more than add missions; it adds some great new weapons to play with and some features that further enhance the experience. All that said, it does little if anything to assuage the irritating aspects of the game.

The tropical setting is nice, and there are some memorable missions. The lush green jungle is welcome brake from the vast arid desert and drab woodland of the previous missions. Though most of the environment is scratched together from assets of the previous games. And the helicopter insertions are cool if a bit cheap, since they are featured mostly in cut scenes rather than a playable part of the game. One of the features I enjoyed was being able to rename the characters. It doesn't have any bearing on the gameplay, but it's cool to play with "A. Schwarzenegger".

The game it self is the same. While that isn't a bad thing, there are some parts of it I find hard to appreciate. For one the AI is still quirky. Enemies can zero in on the player and fire with laser accuracy at extreme ranges. Even when well concealed from view the enemy AI is uncanny at times. Teammates still wonder in to the player's line of fire. They are also zealous at times when they don't need to be. I am still at a loss to explain why they move out in to plain view (and get shot) when they should stay back. And I have been shot in the back by my own trigger-happy squad.

That's the exception and not the rule however and there is still enough to make a good expansion.