Hello dear UFO Gamers readers! Some of you might know or even have played the first Operation Flashpoint, which got a lot of good reviews and a hearty welcome, got a place in people’s hearts etc. etc. I myself haven’t personally played the first but I know a lot of people around me have, and I’ve never heard anything bad about it. Except for maybe the graphics, but it is an old game.

Anyways, people finally get the chance to get the feeling of a real war once again, because Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising has just been released (or at least that’s what they want you to think). Press the little “read more” button if you think you’re ready for this review…

 

 

The installation went fine, nothing too flashy, just an installation. Something that surprised me was that there were no CD key needed, it wasn’t required to play online or anything. As the installation comes close to its finish I start to grow big expectations of the game, I played Armed Assault 2; I was hyped by it, and was hugely disappointed by it. Then this game, OF: DR shows up like out of nowhere and I though “This, this IS Armed Assault 2!”.

When you start the game you are greeted by a neat screen, which says “Press enter to continue”. At this moment I’m thinking, “What? Press enter to continue?!” I instantly think 'console port' and my expectations drop to the floor. However, I get past it; I try to find my mouse cursor. Where is it?! … Nowhere to be found. I start thinking really negative thoughts now but I try to push them away as I put the graphics settings to the top. If this is a console port my computer will feel it.

I go through the flood of buttons in order to start the campaign and when it finally it is over I accidently scrolled my mouse wheel and was wondering why I couldn’t move at all. For some reason you can’t look through the weapons and move at the same time. I then command my squad to follow me. This is done with the WASD keys, not a very good solution because this means you have to stand still while commanding your squad. I’m starting to think that this game maybe is just a real-time strategy game but you get to see from the leader’s eyes or something.

Moving on to the first objective, two AI soldiers come out from the back of a house and start shooting like crazy at me; fortunately my squad takes them down quite fast. I then go up to look at the bodies of my enemies. BAM! I get to see a screen of my character lying dead on the ground. I’m confused, what happened? Three soldiers from about 70-80 meters away behind a sandbag have apparently seen me from behind the house and prepared themselves to shoot just as I get visible. It went so fast I didn’t even hear a gunshot. A bit disappointed I ALT + F4 to get out of the game quickly. The menus are rather annoying to go through, as with all console ports.

An hour or so afterwards I decide to give it another go, but this time I’m not alone. My cousin and I went to try out the co-op game mode after the disappointing single player mode. (Note that I only played this bit of the single player campaign, it might have been better the second time or on the second mission – I would’ve given it a try if the following wouldn’t have happened…)

We go online to do the first mission. This time around it’s a bit easier since if I die someone else in my squad who is a player just needs to stay alive and I’ll spawn in about a minute... easier said than done. Usually when I die the whole squad dies.  Anyways, we both died about 10 times before finally completing the mission.  We tried doing secondary objectives first, because, well, they’re there to be completed but since we kept dying we decided to just do what we had to instead.

Second mission, much easier than the first one and we only failed once or twice but the third mission was a disaster. We kept taking one of the armoured personnel carriers (APCs) available on the mission; you can’t run people over with it because they won’t die. You can’t shoot people who are lying on the ground because the cannon can’t reach them. So, I get out of the APC and kill the guy lying on the floor to complete the mission, and then when I get back into the APC a screen pops up with a burning APC saying “Your whole squad has been terminated” or such. Once again a “What?!” moment. A bit tired now we give up. We decided to try it again tomorrow. This time we complete the mission by NOT taking an APC. Now we’re at mission four and we fail once again. Now I’m really sick and tired of this game and I’m trying not to think about it any more. I went back to Red Faction: Guerrilla which is a lot more sensible.

 

The one thing which could save this game is if the damn checkpoints would work online, because then you wouldn’t mind replaying the last two minutes instead of the last half hour over and over again.

A few other things: you can’t look around while in a vehicle (What? We have that in Battlefield 1942…) and it’s really difficult to drive. As a bonus there are rocks and logs all over the place which will make your car bump until it eventually falls over and you have to get out, you can’t push the car or anything so you’re back to walking. Great. The AI leaves a lot to be desired as well: the squad AI decides it has seen an enemy and goes on a rampage unloading all they have on them. And the enemy AI can take six or seven shots before that they start crawling on the ground, fleeing. Then when you shoot them while they’re down they die. Or at least you think they die, they’re still on your radar so you have to shoot them a few more times and hope they’re dead after that. The funny thing is that the AI can bend the props on the map to their will: my cousin got killed by a guy in a turret while we were behind this guy, he made a 180 degree spin and shot him in the head.  This posed three questions:

1. How did he see him when he was behind him?
2. How did he hear him when he was crawling?
3. How did he turn the machine gun (turret) 180 degrees when it clearly can only be turned 90 degrees both ways?

I actually prefer Armed Assault 2 to this; I mean at least that game had that real war feeling to it. The big downside to Armed Assault 2 was the voice acting and the way they put it together, along with the sloppy frame rate. Other than that it was actually a fun game. Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising looked really promising, but it’s nothing more than a buggy game that, in my opinion, shouldn’t even have been released. At least not “just” after eight years. Come on, eight years and they bring us an even crappier game than Armed Assault 2. I can honestly say that this game is the worst game by far I have ever played this year.

8-D

• Averagely cool weapons
• Nice voice acting

>:-(

• Horrible game menu
• Terrible AI
• You can't switch weapons and move at the same time
• You can forget about trying to change weapons while reloading if an enemy sneaks up on you - you're dead because your character really wants to get weapon reloaded
• Everything else, pretty much

2/5

/rant end