UbiSoft's Tom Clancy series continues with Ghost Recon, another squad-based adventure that emphasizes teamwork, tactics and stealth over raw firepower.

Set in the near future, Ghost Recon hypothesizes a Russia gone bad. Ultranationalists have seized control in Moscow and are trying to reassert the old Soviet sphere of influence over the Baltic republics.

Down Georgia way (we're talking the central Asian country here, not the locale of "The Dukes of Hazzard"), peacekeeping Green Berets find themselves in the middle of major nastiness involving rebels whose strings just might be pulled by Moscow.

Because they strike "swiftly, silently, invisibly," these covert ops hotshots call themselves "ghosts."

The tutorial has been ported virtually unchanged from Tom Clancy's The Sum of All Fears GCN, so if you played the earlier game you can safely skip it here. The tutorial is very clear, but we have one minor beef: you can't pause and view a control scheme. Because the narrator only refers to controls generically -- e.g. "press the action button" -- you're forced to hunt and peck until you figure out what works.

The action careens through 15 spine-tingling missions on vast maps. Objectives run the gamut from search and rescue to demolition jobs to all-out firefights for survival.

You can unlock dozens of weapons and new secrets. Standard and special-issue weapons include the M16A2, the M4 carbine and the OICW.

Although the teams are small (three men apiece), you're given an immense amount of flexibility in selecting members, then equipping and directing them. Vets of arcade-y shooters will be surprised that the characters here can't keep going after taking a zillion hits.

Like the businesslike Ghost Recon operatives themselves, the graphics are focused on getting the job done. You won't be dazzled by way cool particle effects or Bond-like cinematics, but you'll probably be too engrossed in the minutiae of team management, not to mention staying alive, to notice.

Two can have at it in a more traditional head-to-head split-screen mode.