Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising is the offical/unoffical sequel (depending on who you talk to) to the first Operation Flashpoint; a game about soldiering it up and leading a small squad with a huge freedom to approach targets and then getting killed by unseen snipers. Repeatedly. Then crying over your keyboard like the blubbery manchild you are.
Whilst the original developement team Bohemia Interactive went on to make their own sequel in terms of ArmA, publishers Codemasters decided to try and have a shot at it seeming as they still had the rights to slap Flashpoint on a game. Many were fearful that Codemasters would just churn out a lazy shoddy thing, trading in on the good brand name they had accquired (Fear: Perseus Mandate anyone?). Having now got to grips and sat down with the game I can say they’ve made an astounding, but somewhat confused effort.
For those who hate having friends and would rather play through the single-player campaign, thee things strike you in it; Skira is amazingly pretty, the missions are pretty humdrum and your squadmates can just fuck off and die. From the start in OF:DR I was blown away by the beautiful vistas (not the windows version), as it is just plain gorgeous. Grass sways, landscapes flow and light glistens from the scenery in a pleasing manner with the game having an impressive draw distance of 35 kilometers, or 21.7479 miles to those who aren’t French. Yet unfortunatley, this game is like finding a stunning girl at a bar who is great to look at, but once you talk to her you find she trips up on her own feet every 3 steps and is about as interesting as museli after a dog has shat it out.
The game is a reasonable 11 missions long (including the tutorial), but each of these missions feel horribly lacking in some fundamental way. Codemasters has obviously gone to great lengths to build this wonderful fictional island with acres to explore, but all the missions might as well have been lifted from any standard shooter. While I like my meagre attention getting funnelled into what direction to go rather than crippled with over-whelming decision, in a game designed for exploration and planning not alot of either really comes into play. All of the missions have you hand held in what direction you should take along a series of checkpoints up to the objectives.
Now, if they were planning on showing me some orchestrated action sequences I wouldn’t mind but there isn’t. The missions, though in lovingly rendered scenery, feel like standard cookie cutter “Attack objective A, take Building B”. Flashpoint as a series has never been about epic world saving silly action plots (*cough* MW2), as it is foremost a war-sim. But there’s no escalation or imagination in the levels, even the final one that has a greater freedom of approach than the others is just a rather dull fizzle to a bang that never actually happens. Added ontop of this that you don’t get to pick your equipment at all and the baffling choice to not include any of the drivable vehicles or helicopters for you to actually drive in the missions and it all feels rather dissapointing. This is before we get to my greatest foes; my squaddies.
The combat and squadmates of OF:DR serves to remind me that while the modern war sim has come on vastly in terms of large scale battles and visuals, the A.I. still has a fair way to catch up. When playing a more dumb shooter fuzzy logic malfunctions in teamates and enemies are more easily glossed over; you’re more able to compensate for their actions and less vulnerable when you do so. In OF:DR each of these A.I. mistakes are frustrating to say the least, with one less gun backing you up often the difference between success and failure. I cannot recount the amount of times one of my squaddies did something so mind blowingly stupid that any sense of immersion I had was blown. Push me onto a grenade? Go ahead boys! Enter a building and start doing a clockwise loop up and down two different flights of stairs for five minutes? Sound battle sense. The army trains these lads well.
It is in multiplayer though where it redeems itself, as with actual humans at the controls of your squadmates you get an idea of how this game was meant to pan out. The online community is a mix of hardcore often American mic users setting up percise orders, silent types who just get on and play plus the occasional fun person and griefer thrown in. Playing through the campaign again in co-op was silly amounts of fun, from crashing helicopters into jeeps to the satisfaction of a well co-ordinated ambush. The one thing I will beat them over the head with however is the in-game chat; I was fucking appalled at it in Borderlands and I am here so some instructions Devs – Allow a chat log and design a chatbox, not just a console line. Too often will I miss what somebody said as I was busy or not paying attention and having no option to re-read it is a pain. Think Counter-Strike, where pressing y allows you to see everything said up to that point and to scroll upwards, plus I can see clearly where I’m typing wwwwasasdsdddee mistakenly instead of thinking the game crashed again.
Away from it now I feel Dragon Rising is a game let down by a few integral parts; where the same thought and efford that went into pumping it with beauty steroids hasn’t been matched, preventing it from reaching its full potential. I can only hope with patching that they eventually sort out the A.I, and I have high hopes that the community with the mission editor in their hands will create levels worthy of this title, putting to best use the tools and locale that Codemasters worked hard to create. Until then, I’d personally wait a little bit longer till it’s cheaper and hopefully a much smoother game, as ultimatley underneath the A.I and lacklustre missions there’s a good game waiting to burst out.
I’m sorry, I wanted to end on a positive note but I had to point this out. HE DOESN’T TAKE THE CAP OFF THE NEEDLE BEFORE INJECTING YOU WITH IT.
