Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising

8.0

Format Xbox 360

Developer Codemasters

Publisher Codemasters

Genre Action, Shoot 'em Up, Sim / Strategy

17 Comments

We like to think of it as tough love. Spend ages sprinting across a field toward the enemy emplacement only to get a bullet planted deep in your melon when you're still 200 metres away, breathing your last in a foreign land, far from home and surrounded by hostile troops.

Anybody who's grown used to "going Rambo" and charging up to enemies in Call of Duty is in for a very speedy learning experience in the first couple of missions in Operation Flashpoint.

Welcome to a world where every bullet is potentially lethal, every enemy is unpredictable and attempting to tea-bag someone will just result in an embarrassing Polaroid stapled to your coroner's report.
Once you get used to scanning the horizon for hostiles and taking out threats at an average range of 150 metres, though, it all suddenly clicks and you become just as dangerous, if not more so.

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Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising doesn't have levels, it has AOs, each a vast "area of operation" that offers you (and up to three co-op mates) the chance to express yourself tactically in a way that no other shooter on Xbox 360 quite manages.

Faced with insurmountable odds during a frontal assault? You always have the space, if not necessarily the time, to stage a side-on or rear attack. When you fail a mission and end up face-down in the dirt, you don't just try again, you take a moment to adjust the plan. So while CoD and the like aim for Hollywood-inspired set-pieces, Op Flash feels like actually being a soldier.

Background colour
The island of Skira is vast and often remarkably atmospheric. While the Ego engine can't replicate DiRT 2 levels of fidelity, with such a huge environment to decorate you'll still find breathtaking valleys, dense forests and thick grassland as you progress through the game.

The environment is also one of the thousands of variables that Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising throws at you during a firefight. Finding cover can be extremely tough, and vegetation often obscures your vision if you clatter to a prone position to avoid enemy fire. Then there's the sheer range involved in a battlefield this big - bullets don't travel in a straight line over hundreds of metres, so you have to account for the drop off.

You might think this distance sounds less involving, but don't be fooled. It's still deeply satisfying to plug baddies at range, and the relative comfort of a strategically advantageous position provides a neat contrast to the panicked moments when the enemy has got the drop on you.

There's also plenty of variety in the missions, and while there are recommended ways to solve all of them, as long as the objectives are completed, your commanding officer isn't going to complain.

Broadly, they're split into two main flavours, stealth and infantry, but the pace with which you progress doesn't actually change much between the two - a sort of measured efficiency is best, with the odd frantic time-limited charge.

Instead it's the suggested tactics, the supplied equipment and the nature of the objectives that keeps things spicy.
Needless to say with such a realistic replication of warfare, there are going to be frustrating periods where you end up being repeatedly killed, but that can be argued away as par for the course.

What would help would be if Operation Flashpoint didn't compound the problem with confusing directions, a merciless checkpoint system and occasionally broken objectives. If you're particularly blunder-prone you can accidentally render a mission impossible, trigger a checkpoint that prevents you from backtracking to fix the problem and, worst of all, spend ages trying to work out what's going on because the game doesn't tell you what you did wrong.

It's at these moments where the game's flexibility butts heads with the reliability we're used to from an Xbox 360 game. Perhaps it's a deliberate comment on how under-informed a standard infantry grunt is in a modern army, but somehow we doubt it.
Things seem to get more broken the more freedom the game gives you.

The final mission gleefully offers up tanks and helicopters for you to play with and a huge AO to tool around in, but with all those extra possibilities it's extremely easy to cause the mission structure to totally unravel itself.

In spite of all this, it never ruins the charm of a game that is ultimately about total freedom and glorious, barely contained ambition. Whatever you're up to, whether it's assaulting an airfield, disabling a fuel depot or legging it with a bunch of liberated POWs through the early morning mist, you feel like your contribution, whether direct or strategic, is making the difference between victory and defeat in a large-scale conflict.

Even if that conflict occasionally goes slightly mad like a catnip-addled kitten.
Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising isn't a game in the traditional, tightly structured sense. As a large-scale war sim it's more like an enormous clockwork toy that you can prod and fiddle with to your heart's content.

Every so often you'll tweak the wrong component and gears and springs will start pinging out all over the shop, but it's because there's so much interconnected stuff going on over the course of a single mission.

The vast majority of the time, when everything's properly meshed and you're part of that machine, it's an exhilarating and terrifying experience. More than anything, it's a game that, even after completion, we want to keep returning to again and again, adding different ingredients to the freeform formula and seeing what kind of explosions we can create.

We can guarantee you won't have played an FPS quite like this on Xbox 360 but, now that one's arrived, you certainly should.

Mike Channell