Conflict: Denied Ops

5.0

Format Xbox 360

Developer Pivotal Games

Publisher Eidos Interactive

Genre Action, Shoot 'em Up, Sim / Strategy

The first thing that hits you right from the start of the new Conflict game is that the dialogue is awesome. Awesome if you were a teenage boy that slipped into a coma in 1985 while watching Commando and just woke up in 2008 to the mixed news that your last 23 years were spent with a smoothie tube in one end and a man-nappy fielding the other, but never mind, Rambo is back in the cinema! Lang and Graves, the two predictably dysfunctional comrades you control and switch between at will in Denied Ops, spar verbally throughout the game with the worst kind of stock war-buddy drivel imaginable and you have to wonder if game coders were put in charge of the script to save some pennies...

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"Yeah, Geoff isn't it? We're gonna go ahead and ask you to leave the anti-aliasing of the icebergs for now and umm... start you off dialoguing the African reunion sequence. You know, when Lang thinks Graves is dead, but Graves isn't dead and Lang pretends he hoped Graves was dead, but Lang is actually glad he's not dead and they both look deep into each others eyes for a bit. That kinda thing. Oh, and make sure Lang says 'blood' and 'bro' in every sentence because he's, well, you know... ethnic!"

And this is a terrible shame, because the one thing Denied Ops really needed to do was show us that the wait for the first Xbox 360 Conflict game was worth it, to wow us all with the next big thing in tactical team combat. Unfortunately the shoddy dialogue is symptomatic of the game as a whole, which always feels clunky, dated (there really are more explosive barrels than in Doom) and lacking in ambition. Co-op gaming has come a long way since Xbox 360 arrived and great experiences such as the Tom Clancy reinventions - Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter and Rainbow Six Vegas - have unfortunately left the Conflict series way behind, MIA, bleeding out into the sand.

Conflict isn't an irredeemably dreadful FPS, but it's just so drearily predictable in the way that Call of Duty 4, for instance, was not. Of course COD4 sets the highest of standards, but its most important lesson to Conflict should have been that you can set a shooter in familiar, modern and well-beaten territory but still keep the action sharp, the experience fresh, with slick controls, utterly polished set pieces, and battles, not soldiers, that speak for themselves. Denied Ops fails on all these counts. Enemy AI is choppy and slow to respond, there are far too many drab corridors and bland landscapes, and locations we've visited many times in other shooters are given few fresh twists. Control is unwieldy - neither aim nor movement is anywhere near fast or tight enough, with an old-fashioned lean instead of the latest in cover-hugging, plus an unnecessary context-sensitive A button that has to be pressed to climb low walls and ladders.

It sounds good to be able to switch between characters and direct your AI buddy, but although a big deal has been made of this 'Crossfire' system, you'll rarely swap out 'heavy weapons' Lang and 'sniper' Graves for any better reason than you're getting sick of one of them and mistakenly hope you may find the other less grindingly homo-erotic for a bit. Dog-stupid enemy AI means you'll rarely bother with tactical commands and anyway Lang is far more useful to lead in almost every situation, with his accurate machine-gun that rarely needs reloading and plenty of secondary explosive weapons.

The first Conflict game on Xbox 360 is indeed a Denied Opportunity, a shooter that hasn't made a happy transition from team-of-four third-person to two-man first-person, at its best disappointingly average and at its worst like being a quipped-at golf caddy for Sly and Arnie over a full 18-holes. A good franchise spoiled.

OXM Staff